About a month ago I noticed some strange stuff in my access logs here and saw what seemed to be a hacking attempt against my forum software. I immediately fixed the vulnerability by upgrading to the latest version, and kept watching. Hacking attempts continued afterwards, increasingly, although none were having any effect… a few days ago, they were up to a few hundred per day. Yesterday, they almost doubled my traffic…<\/p>\n
…and today in the morning my site suddenly went offline. I learned a few hours later that a friend’s forum, hosted on the same server, had been hacked by what is now known as the Santy Worm<\/a>, and used to launch an outgoing DDOS attack against other servers. Not funny; especially as the provider yanked the whole machine offline while they tried to find out what was going on and what to do.<\/p>\n Still, they responded correctly, if slowly, upgrading their software to a non-vulnerable version and blocking all outgoing connections from the server, which shouldn’t impact anyone as far as I can see. I may seize the occasion and later in the week implement some more changes here…<\/p>\n If you tried to access this site, or download something, during the few hours we were down, my apologies. Hopefully it won’t happen again soon.<\/p>\n