An apology and an important announcement

I apologize for the low volume of posts yesterday.  It was a frantic day.  I finally finished the brief, with a lot of help from DQ, who insisted that the finished product be logical, articulate and compelling.  I’m very glad to have that off my desk.  Immediately after finishing the brief, I went into hyper-Mom mode, because I was driving kids to and picking them up from points all over the North Bay.  I threw into that mix getting my daughter some very necessary new sports glasses, and that pretty much precluded any hopes of blogging.

When I finally did get to the computer, I couldn’t do anything because the site was down.  It turns out that it was down for a rather flattering reason:  someone takes umbrage at the blogs Terry Trippany (of Webloggin) hosts on his server.  That means we’re making a difference.  If we made no ripples, no one would care.  Here’s Terry’s email explaining what happened and how this might affect you:

It appears that someone has been trying to shut down some targeted blogs on my servers since about June 17th by running a known wordpress exploit and some other DOS style attacks.  These are typically spammers but in this case I think it might be someone that is not exactly a fan of the political commentary that many of my users put on their blogs.

To fix this I upgraded all blogs to wordpress 2.6, put in some rules to block the offenders and added a new plugin that you can activate and run on your blog from the dashboard via the exploit scanner link once it is activated.

The new rules [that will be implemented with the exploit scanner] are kind of aggressive so please let me know if I inadvertently deny access to you or any of your readers.  I am filtering based on ip’s found using the exploit.

Tonight’s actual attacked brought down my server for about 3 hours so I have to be a little aggressive to prevent that from happening again.

If you find that you or any of your readers cannot access your blogs, please ask them to go to http://www.myipaddress.com/show-my-ip-address/ and report back what their IP address is so I can let them back in.

This is very important.  In many cases people’s machine are being taken over by hackers in the middle of the night without their knowledge. Thus they are vulnerable themselves for other kinds of hacks. There is a well known trick that takes over peoples computers and uses their e-mail clients to send out comment and e-mail spam, most often related to porn.