Thursday, November 29, 2007

Under attack

I've had to take my own website, factorxsystems.com, down. It had become infected with a nasty little piece of javascript that hooked up to a Russian site, x-victory.ru. Don't worry, this blog's hosted by google! Do a search on x-victory.ru and it looks like it's being run by the Russian Business Network as a means of infecting pc's to recruit them for its network of zombies, poised to deluge others the world over with spam, or to be used in co-ordinated DDOS attacks. You can find out more about this nefarious criminal organisation here and at CastleCops

At first I thought I'd been sloppy in my coding and security, but I couldn't find where they'd got in. After some digging, it seems there are loads of other sites hosted on the same server who are all infected. I found who they were by means of my IP neighbors. Don't look at any of those other sites unless you have a good, up-to-date antivirus and preferably a firewall (use it to exclude addresses 58.65.239.114 and 85.255.114.170). This could well mean the server is infected by a rootkit.

I e-mailed the hosting company, 3ix's support people whose response was that I was at fault. Dig around enough and you can see people have been complaining to 3ix about this for at least the last 2 weeks.

It's bad enough having RBN around, far worse when people in the business make their life so easy.

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Terroryst Plotte Foyled

Nov 5th, 1605.

A terrorist plot to blow up the House of Lords was discovered today minutes before it could be executed and the entire country thrown into chaos. The plotters, mad Catholic fundamentalists, were planning to mount a coup in its wake, reverting this country to a mediaeval theocracy. They had assembled the largest ever cache of the advanced explosive, gunpowder.

The serjeant-at-arms, Sir William Bastarde, said today the terrorists were caught at the very last moment and marks a major achievement for the security forces, who were doing a good job under very difficult circumstances. The insurgents were being held in the maximum security prison at the Tower of London. He denied they were being tortured and were merely undergoing standard 'robust' interrogation techniques such as the rack, hot irons and being broken on the wheel.

Sir William said the terrorists, led by Robert Catesby and Guy 'Guido' Fawkes, would be tried and then executed. The government would press for the maximum penalty, hanging, drawing and quartering, and he deplored 'namby pamby liberals' who would like them to get off with a beheading.

Make no mistake, this plot has been hatched in Rome by the Catholofascist Vatican. A spokesman for the Pope today said that the Pope deplored terrorism and condemned wholeheartedly anyone involved in such bombings.