Archive

Posts Tagged ‘security’

Don’t Spam me Bro

June 5th, 2009

I started publishing the culprits of spam on my spammer-log page. It started with email spam that was getting through my Postini filters. However, Postini is so good, there is hardly any spam to report from my email. But my blog is getting spammed now through the back channels. I don’t know how they do it; my blog only allows comments from registered users. Somehow these jokers submit comments without registering by some hack method. That method, whatever it is, is an illicit act since the spammers are hacking my blog to post their crap.

The interesting thing is that these are mostly SEO black hats that were hired by unsuspecting customers who just want to do well in the search engines. So I post the website they are optimizing and note it with my own comment about how the owner of that website basically hired a criminal to do their SEO. If they care anything about their business, they should fire them immediately. Google penalization and banning is not a myth. It is very real, and when more sites like mine post the bad apples, Google will be made aware of whats going on. However, the most common way your site will get the attention of Google is from your competitors reporting you because they see what you are doing. THey basically rat you out, and that’s a good thing because you are cheating.

Bottom line is to hire a reputable SEO that doesn’t do this nonsense and violate other websites for your temporary benefit. Yeah, I’m one of those reputable SEOs that does not cheat. Contact me if you want the real deal.

Web Security ,

Bandwidth Theft

May 19th, 2009

I just ran through some logs and discovered that people are stealing my bandwidth by hot-linking to my images. What is this? Instead of downloading images found on the web to use for your own purposes, which is dubious anyway, the criminal actually uses the URL to my site for the src in the img tag. This means that not only are they stealing the image, they are stealing bandwidth which I pay for.

Some people do this unaware that they are actually stealing, others do it to save their own bandwidth when their site gets busy. Either way, it is a real crappy thing to do. Its like running a secret wire from your neighbor’s house to run YOUR electric stuff. Which also happened to me!

My solution? The old switcheroo! If I find a image being linked from my site, I just replace that image on my server with something that the thief would not want on their site. Its kinda funny and it works to get them off your server.

The other option is to prevent “hotlinking” via .htaccess. This is fine, but its not nearly as fun! To all you bandwidth thieves.. enjoy the new pics!

Web Security ,