I’ve received a few hundred requests originating from bots setting site.ru as their referrer. These attacks are scanning for compromised WordPress installations and PHP based shells and backdoors. The attacking IP’s belong to compromised hosts and websites from service providers around the world.

I wanted to register a new domain name and decided to go with the privacy-aware domain registration service from Njalla. Unlike other domain registration services, Njalla actually purchases the domain for themselves and acquires full legal ownership and responsibility for the domain name. Njalla however grants you full control over the domain as long as you abide by their terms and conditions.

About one and a half months ago I experienced a lot of botnet traffic originating from major cloud providers including Microsoft Azure. Against my better judgment I decided to see if reporting a few bad IP’s to the MS CERT team would make a difference.

So you’ve patiently been waiting for the next Slackware release but eventually you’re considering making the move to Slackware-current. So what exactly is Slackware-current and what would be the pros and cons of switching from stable to -current.

My Raspberry Pi based hosting came to an abrupt end earlier this week as the RPi3 suddenly became unresponsive. Powering off and on the device resulted in an infinitive loop of I/O error messages. I’ve tried to recover the filesystem, but unfortunately my attempts proved to be unsuccessful.

I got the following ominous sounding message as I was about to fire up my Opera browser at the office today:

During the last few days I’ve been noticing a major surge in botnet traffic probing for the infamous Apache Struts 2 exploit, popular database setup and configuration scripts and even some old school cgi-bin vulnerabilities. The traffic originates from compromised hosts with major cloud vendors like Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode and OVH.

Accessing internal services on paranoidpenguin.net using self-signed certificates does no longer work in my preferred browser due to HSTS preloading. Instead of actually fixing the issue (or wait for Let’s Encrypt to roll out wildcard certificates), I decided to be clever and work around the restriction by installing a more “forgiving” web browser.

I recently re-learned that moving code from one Linux distribution to another doesn’t always pan out as expected. Especially when that second distribution is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.