Unfortunately my server died on me last weekend, so I had to spend the weekend on migrating everything to another host….
Everything should be running smoothly now, as I am no longer in charge of the server and have no ways of screwing it up 
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Again some server downtime
Monday, August 3rd, 2009Information exchange
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009Today I was behind my computer when I received tweets about a severe vulnerability in Microsoft Office Web Components. Although it did not apply to me ( I am not using internet explorer, actually most of the time I am not even using windows ), I figured I had loved this way of information exchange when I was a network/system administrator in a previous job.
In a fairly big network it would have been plausible that every few hours a PC would be infected due to this vulnerability. So the faster the problem is known, the less damage could have been done to the client machines.
I can recommend any system/network administrator to sign-up for a twitter account and follow some security related persons / groups. Reading tweets costs time, but it will spare you time when something bad is on the loose.
Guy with restraining order requests facebook credentials
Saturday, July 4th, 2009Today I was catching up with the Full Disclosure mailing list and read a conversation that was both funny and worrying at the same time.
A man requested for the user name and password of both his wife’s and daughters of their facebook, email and myspace accounts on the mailing list. The reply that came on the request was hilariously.
“Why not just ask her?
Hope you don’t mind: I forwarded your mail to email_at_yahoo.com”
So now his wife knew he was asking people to hack her account.
Then the worrying part came in to play. One of the guys on the list googled his name ( the dumb ass had given his real name ) and found a police report which stated that he was suspected of violating a restraining order. A reverse lookup of his IP address revealed he was indeed located in the city the restraining order was issued. Luckily they reported the incident to the local police through a web form.
But what if he had not been that ignorant, and he had found a forum where people had helped him? He then could have access to their online agenda and known where his wife and child would go to all the time.
This lead me to think: He might also be searching for them on the internet. Adding them on facebook or other social communities with another name.
He may have had a restraining order in real life, but how to restrain someone from stalking on the Internet?
Down time
Saturday, July 4th, 2009I have had a bit of downtime yesterday.
The other night my server crashed with a kernel panic ( still investigating why that happened?) so unfortunately my website had been down a few hours.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Dutch anti-piracy foundation website DoS attacked
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009Yesterday, the Dutch anti-piracy foundation BREIN has summoned The Pirate Bay founders to appear in court for their part in the file-sharing activities of the users of The Pirate Bay.
Today, hackers have performed a Denial Of Service (DOS) attack on the website of BREIN ( www.anti-piracy.nl) which brought the complete website down.
According to a spokeswoman of BREIN they plan to have the website up and running as soon as possible. She also added to say, that such an attack is highly exceptional.
Well, I have seen this coming. The Pirate Bay is one of the biggest torrent sites around, and summoning them for court probably has pissed a lot of people off…