You are probably not interested in my website statistics, but I am. I just thought I’d have a look at my latest visitors. I found that someone had just been trying to access my (now) non-existent wordpress folder. This is the folder that contained my old blog before I was hacked.

The user asked for 700 different pages in under two minutes, this suggests a program running around the net, looking for known insecurities.

One request, for instance, was: /wordpress/wp-includes/Text/update.php?act=f&f=www.wildlifesystems.co.uk%3A80.cnf&d=%2Fusr%2Flocal%2Ff

You may notice a website address in there. www.wildlifesystems.co.uk has nothing to do with me and I never heard of them before this. They are suppliers of webcams for watching wildlife. Quite innocent and it would seem from my stats, someone is after them for something – and the other 699 other websites that are mentioned in all the other requests to my wordpress folder.

This must be going on 24/7 all over the web. Who are these people? The web is such a wonderful resource – but I fear it will be brought down by the rampant crime and deceit that seems to go on under the surface. We only the see the part of the web that we want to see.

I’m reminded of the chickens I used to keep. A fox would visit them every day, checking the perimeter fence for holes. One day, a hole had rusted just enough to let him in and kill all but one of them. He didn’t eat them, just killed them in a pointless frenzy.

Knowing that people are trying to infiltrate and take over my site all day long is like sitting inside, watching the zombies outside trying to find any way in.

And they are zombies – these people are so removed from real life and the people they are attacking, that it has just become a mild computer game to them. They think they are like James Bond villains, sitting in their control rooms, stroking their cats, trying to achieve world domination, or the domination of its bank accounts.

Actually the main driver behind a lot of this hacking is kudos. While you may imagine an arch villain, it’s more likely to be a spotty young man with no social skills, whose real kick is to post his success on hacking websites, (that really should be monitored by the police), so that he can prove to the other kids how cool he thinks he is.

This innocent is probably encouraged by Fagin-like mentors, (that the spotty youth thinks are kids like him – it’s another form of internet grooming), who then swoop in on the cracked site to set up their scams.

I suppose it was ever thus – it’s just so much easier to do and on a wider stage than ever before. If anything will destroy the internet, it will be the virus of scammers, spammers and stupid hackers.