ICANN’s decision to cash in and allow an unlimited number of new gTLDs has provided us with several new TLDs used predominantly for criminal purposes by malicious actors. My inbound mail servers have been flooded with spam from thousands of .icu domains for the better part of 2019.
Patrick Volkerding has finally confirmed the authenticity of the Slackware Linux Patreon page in a post over at LinuxQuestions.org.
After the Slackware Patreon page was initially discovered in mid-June 2019, it has been the source of quite a bit of debate regarding its authenticity. Anyhow, with that question out of the way, the bigger question now is whether there is still enough interest in Slackware Linux to make it a sustainable business for Mr. Volkerding.
In preparation for my move from WordPress to Hugo, I read a few blog posts on the subject to make sure I wouldn’t run into a brick wall. After all, Google had already indexed over 3000 posts covering the subject in detail so what could possibly go wrong?
I was spending an evening window shopping for a future BSD hosting provider when I came across ARP Networks and its list of VPS plans. What caught my attention was not the technical specifications, but rather the naming scheme that I found to be simply astounding.
Last week I noticed yet another ongoing brute-force attack against our managed WordPress hosting. The botnet is very low key and each bot connects on average only once per day. Up until now, I’ve collected in the ballpark of 3100 unique bots.
Your favorite privacy-aware domain registration service now supports DNSSEC with the click of a button. I’m not exactly sure when this got added, but DNSSEC is now available for selected TLDs.
I figured it was about time for this Gentoo powered blog to enjoy the security and performance enhancements provided by TLSv1.3. However, that meant leaving “Gentoo stable” behind and travel on a journey of discovery into the land of the unmasked and dangerous.
Like everyone else with an email address, I’ve been receiving these bitcoin extortion messages for months. I’ve also observed with ever greater dissatisfaction as scammers raked in tens of bitcoins within a week. What especially annoys me is not so much that people are falling for this scam, but that email service providers are simply looking the other way.
Earlier this week I noticed a minor brute-force attack against our managed WordPress hosting. The attack lasted for 72 hours and deployed around 2000 unique bots. The botnet attempted on average 100 logins per hour while rotating bots to avoid triggering our automatic defense systems.
I was unaware that Facebook recently had started to add a unique click identifier to all outbound links on facebook.com. Coincidentally, one of the security measures of this server is to disallow query strings as part of the URL. Thus, any visitors coming over from Facebook were suddenly blocked and banned on sight.