• It’s amazing what you learn by looking closely at website statistics. If you have read more about this blog, you will know that I was badly hacked last month and had to rebuild my website. I concluded that my self-hosted blog running on WordPress had been the backdoor in for the hackers as all the symptoms were replicated on other websites that were run on WordPress.

    I moved my blog to wordpress.com, who host it and keep it up to date and, hopefully safer from intrusion.

    I was looking through my new website statistics this morning and thought, “That’s a lot of 404s.” 404 is the code for a page that is not found when someone directly asks for it. With a new website structure, I would expect quite a few 404s from people who may have now out of date files bookmarked on their browsers. It these were all case like that, I was frustrating a lot of people.

    Many of the 404s came from tiny graphic files that I had stripped out of the site design. I’d not stripped them out of the CSS though, which is still calling for the files when you enter any of my pages. That should sort out a lot.

    But woah! 91,627 attempts to reach a file called /wordpress/wp-includes/Text/update.php. That must be the vulnerable file in the set up I had at the time I was hit. I’ve had a further 1225 requests for my old WordPress login page, so someone must be trying to get in manually.

    Then I had 1135 requests for /Contact/files/paypal/cgi-bin/webscrcmd=_login-run/webscrcmd=_account-run/updates-paypal/confirm-paypal/Thanks.htm. I don’t know if that string of letters means anything to you? It does to me. The guys who hacked me were running a spoof paypal site on my site. When you get those annoying emails from PayPal saying that you need to change your pin number or whatever, it is false site like these that you are sent to.

    How I was supposed to know where to find it? It was hidden away in a most innocuous folder. All I knew was that my ISP shut me down for suspicious behaviour. Whatever I did they got back in. Somehow, they had got their own account on my site control panel and could do what they liked.

    Looking at my referrers stats, I can see some very strange sites sending people to my site. They are middle eastern hackers sites. My site is written up there as having been hacked, open and available. They are still sending people to me and no doubt they are still trying to hack their way in. What did I ever do to upset them?

    But that’s the point, I’ve done nothing to upset them. They don’t care a toss. They might fly under some bogus cause, but really they are just callous criminals, using any site they can crack into to steal money of the unsuspecting.

    It’s amazing the story a few lines of code can tell. A bit CSI, eh?

  • I’ve just finished The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House,which my daughter gave me for Father’s Day. I didn’t know anything about it, so I approached it as a who dunnit – which is not what it is, so part of me is feeling a bit let down because I was waiting for the great revelation, which never came and was never intended to come.

    It’s a wonderful, forensic study of a horrible Victorian crime. It shows us that the obsessions of the press, (and their readers) are the same now as they were then. I was surprised by the compassion shown to the guilty party. We have been brought up to believe Dickens was Victorian Britain – Jarndice versus Jardice – lock’em up and let’em rot – but it’s good to know that sympathy could also be added to the mix where justice was concerned.

    Nothing much really changes. We think we are so clever and modern, so different from our ignorant predecessors. While we are still Human, we can always learn from the lessons of the past. there is nothing new under the sun.

  • Tube and Canvas Stacking Chair
    Tube and Canvas Stacking Chair
    My friends, Chris and Charlotte, braved the elements yesterday and went ahead with their barbecue in the orchard. They had a ebay marquee to shelter us from the squally showers, that was in danger of blowing away at any moment, thus adding a frisson of excitement to the afternoon. The poles didn’t quite fit together, so the men, having given their two pennyworth on the subject of lighting barbecues, moved on to the subject of keeping the roof over their heads intact.

    There, for us to sit on, dragged out of the back of the barn were my old school stacking chairs, that Chris said he’d rescued from a village hall when the chairs were being thrown out.

    Architects love chairs. We mostly sit on what is there and do not think about the design. This chair probably has a name and is probably very famous within chair loving circles, but I couldn’t find it through Google. It was a perfect design for an austerity Britain.

    We had lots of coal and steel and strong unions looking after coal and steel workers interests, so the frame is made from tubular steel, which is easy to manipulate and gives a good weight/strength ratio. We also had Cotton mills ramped up to make canvas for the wartime military that was no longer needed. The two materials came together perfectly in this chair.

    I remember as a child, we would have competitions to see how high we could stack the chairs. There was a tipping point at which the wobbling tower of chairs would overbalance and come crashing down, with a very satisfactory effect, leaving chairs strewn across the gymnasium floor.

    I vaguely remember the stacks of chairs up against the wall being used by intrepid children in games of Pirate, a game that was eventually banned. The stack would provide a wonderful hiding place from the marauding pirates until it came time to escape, that’s when the stack would come tumbling down, usually resulting in a broken leg or arm. Were we tougher in those days or more stupid?

    The seat canvas would eventually fray at the front. This would lead to a small tear which grew, almost as if the canvas was being unzipped down the middle. Every now and then during assemblies, a small boy would slowly sink towards the floor as the canvas finally ripped in two. He would be completely trapped within the cage of steel, surrounded by a gaggle of boys, rendered unable to help by fits of giggles.

    Angry looking teachers would then wade into the melée, extract the child and make them stand outside and wait to be punished for the inherent design faults of a post-war classic.