Facebook Likes

There appears to be a scam, well, several of them because I have seen this before, where you can buy your friends. The facebook like, when it came out a few years ago was often prized, it is a measure of how popular your site is. For a small regional charity with around 250 visits a month, having 30-50 likes is important as this helps to propagate your site among other local people.

However don’t get too focused on it. I keep seeing mails like this one below.

Contact Us

On: Apr 19, 2016 @ 11:23 PM
IP: 45.40.34.110

Name: Donna
Contact Number: http://nft.lol/7uzt
Email Address: wifjgjglyx@gmail.com
I wish to contact you about:
Your message: Did you just create your new Facebook page? Do you want your page to look a little more “established”? I found a service that can help you with that. They can send organic and 100% real likes and followers to your social pages and you can try before you buy with their free trial. Their service is completely safe and they send all likes to your page naturally and over time so nobody will suspect that you bought them. Try their service for free here: http://janluetzzler.de/3vm2

Continue reading Facebook Likes

WordFence reports hacking world

Many of the sites I have built use a plugin called WordFence. This provides a number of methods for protecting your site. It was only when I added this plugin into a site several years ago was I able to see what is really going on. It reveals hackers attempting to get into your site and uses several methods to keep them out.

They have recently carried out a survey with around 870 respondents replying about their experiences of hackers getting into sites. It shows the most common attacks and describes what they are and why hackers use them.

You can read the article here: https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/04/hackers-compromised-wordpress-sites/#comment-25733

Some reports relating to gmail addresses

Posted Feb 9th 2016

Over the past 5 days I have had three reports from different people having problems logging into sites. These are people that have been trying to reset passwords, or using two step authentication.

I have logged into these websites and have also tested password recovery and it has worked ok for me. The people concerned were all using gmail addresses. While I have also tried to use my gmail address and not had any problems here either, I do know that gmail is split across many servers, and perhaps there is a problem with gmail currently. I do not know how to test this any further to find out.

If you have tried to login and were not able to do so, or have tried to recover your password, or are using two layer authentication and it is not working let me know and I will check. Do not at this time assume you are doing anything wrong, just let me know, it is relatively simple for me to check.

Hacked Site

While nobody wants to have a hacked site, and we all take lots of precautions; one occurred in December. We are unable to establish what precisely had happened, but it looks as though the hacker got into the hosting space rather than into the website.

There are several ways to get into the hosting space, via the hosting provider, through my master account which can access everywhere, or through a username and password combination to something called cPanel. This controls the hosting and email.

In this case the hack was fortunately benign and quite clever. Around the website were additional menus that related to the content on the site. So to someone arriving on the site, it looked a little odd but related.

There were menus that related to families and young children, and these invited you to go to other related sites. What is happening here is that the hacker will probably receive referral fees by steering people to these other sites. This would be the motivation for doing it. So it was not a more typical defacement. Continue reading Hacked Site

Sucuri Plugin – Slow site?

All of the sites use a Sucuri plugin which monitors and hardens the site against security threats. I have had several reports and have witnessed myself that editing the sites are slower than normal, and you may see an error like this:

Sucuri: (1452076628) Send_log: SSL connect error.

This message is indicating that a message was sent to a site that logs activity on your site. When you edit something, I generally get a message to indicate at a high level that something has happened on the site. 99.999% of the time it is normal activity, so I dismiss the items. It is this function that does not seem to be working predictably.

If you site is slow to respond to editing, and/ or you see a message from Sucuri, then go to the Plugins menu item. Locate the item (see image below) and temporarily deactivate it.

sucuri

This will stop the problem from occurring. When you have finished your editing turn it back on.

Continue reading Sucuri Plugin – Slow site?

Spam Emails

A message from Sandra:

Because I set up a lot of sites, I see quite a few of the same messages. Here is one you may have seen. It is not from a human.

Contact Us

On: Nov 27, 2015 @ 12:01 PM
IP: 107.173.160.108

Name: Sandra
Contact Number: tshmusuebqe@sskdolek.net
Email Address: http://www.arvut.org/1/dft
I wish to contact you about:
Your Message: Hi my name is Sandra and I just wanted to drop you a quick note here instead of calling you. I came to your Contact Us | (your name here) page and noticed you could have a lot more traffic. I have found that the key to running a successful website is making sure the visitors you are getting are interested in your niche. There is a company that you can get targeted visitors from and they let you try their service for free for 7 days. I managed to get over 300 targeted visitors to day to my website. Visit them here: http://ittsy.com/it/3x

Continue reading Spam Emails

Example Brute Force Hacking Attempt

How strong are your keys?

As you are all probably aware I get messages from all of the websites I look after that advise me of certain things that are happening on them. It may be an administrator logging in, or someone editing a post or page. I generally ignore them unless they are occurring at strange times of the day, or it is an account name I do not recognise.

brute force attacks — A small selection of the emails I get each day and night!

Continue reading Example Brute Force Hacking Attempt

Scam for .org users

22nd November 2015

I received this message this morning. (I removed the full domain name)

Domain Notification: MARK WINGROVE This is your Final Notice of Domain Listing – xxxxx.ORG

Requested Reply Before: November 23,2015

PART I: REVIEW SOLICITATION

Attn: MARK WINGROVE

As a courtesy to domain name holders, we are sending you this notification for your business Domain name search engine registration. This letter is to inform you that it’s time to send in your registration and save.

Failure to complete your Domain name search engine registration by the expiration date may result in cancellation of this offer making it difficult for your customers to locate you on the web. Continue reading Scam for .org users

Issues sending mail to Talk Talk customers

(3rd November 2015).

I have received messages from two clients over the past two days relating to “bounce back” messages being returned from the TalkTalk network.

The messages will carry this text:

Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

someone@talktalk.net Continue reading Issues sending mail to Talk Talk customers

Redirecting unwanted email

While I consider myself to be fairly IT literate I sometimes get it wrong, in this case I could have set up my administration differently. This post covers one such example. It was an irritation more than anything else, but a mistake I will not make again before heading on a vacation!

I have many different email addresses, but use one primary one, and have several others forwarded to that email address. The others are used for backup purposes because they use different servers and different infrastructures. Prior to going on vacation I limited the volume of emails being sent to me from websites mainly because I had emails coming in which held important vacation information from resorts, services, car hire etc. I did not want to miss them.

Taken near Ayres Rock, central Australia. A bit of fly problem in this area! (fortunately they were not the biting kind. — Taken near Ayres Rock, central Australia. A bit of fly problem in this area! (Fortunately they were not the biting kind).

Preparation before heading on vacation

I backed up all of the sites and checked them in September 2015 making sure everything was up to date and functioning. Continue reading Redirecting unwanted email