The blog had been my favorite hobby since 2008.
Several hundred viewers seemed to like it.
Then, suddenly, everyone including me got this:
The host provider, Bluehost, said someone had accessed the site and planted malware. Dozens of files were corrupted, and dangerous to access.
What seems to be a burgeoning fun activity from the basements of parents is breaking into whatever sites can be accessed and committing mayhem.
Damn teenage hackers, right?
Well… Not so fast, Boomer (that would be me).
Word Press offers, for a limited time, a limited list of recent login attempts.
The last one had an IP address: 5.183.130.233
The WhoIs website helpfully traces owners of urls and IP addresses – and does it for free (That makes it attractive to a retired, and very cheap, child of the Truman administration)
Just for giggles, take a look:
https://www.whois.com/whois/5.183.130.233
You just might get the same result I did.
So who the hell is the Biterika Grupp?
And a Moscow corporation? Really?
Okay, so Google is still our friend, right?
Well… except for privacy. Still…
Turns out a non-zero number of complaints against the Biterika Group have to do with brute force attempts at hacking into minor websites.
So why me?
A small blog with a small, friendly readership with similar interests.
Hardly a threat to the erstwhile Putin empire of the future.
Well, Taegan Goddard is a must-read, and there is this…
A high percentage of the misinformation on social media comes from Putin paid trolls.
Many are new. Many are clumsy.
They make mistakes.
Which makes them fun for aging denisons like me.
Like this one who claimed to be a US combat veteran.
He posted a photo with a background of the White House, thinking it was in Minnesota.
Or this combat veteran claiming to have been awarded a military medal for his heroism in battle.
The award he mentioned was for infantry bravery.
The battle he insisted it came from was a raid conducted entirely by air.
Or this American who got mixed up on which accusations were against which candidate.
He referred to what he insisted bogus accusations against Trump, involving Russian hooks.
Although he sprinkled his language with y’all‘s, he couldn’t remember the word “hooker”.
It was entertainment for me, but perhaps embarrassing for the occasional low-level employee of a troll farm.
Could some angry troll have diverted a small bit of Biterika Group attention to the posted website of this gloating American?
Could be, I suppose.
Or it could be an undifferentiated attack on thousands of minor blog sites.
Or it could be something else.
Infidel753 has advice I wish I had followed.
Meanwhile, I’ll try keeping up from here at Red-State-Blues
11 responses to “Putin and Me
(Why Fair & Unbalanced Is Down)”
Congratulations on your return to the net!
It may indeed be that Russian trolls are touchy about being rumbled. The less convincing ones are probably in constant danger of being pulled off computer duty and sent to the front in Ukraine. No more vodka and “hooks” for them.
I’ll be watching to see how the new site develops.
Glad you’re back. Fuck Moscow.
I’m so glad to see that you are back. A small victory in the seemingly endless war against vicious stupidity, whether from Russia, or their MAGA clients in the U.S.
Glad to see you back–can’t keep a good blogger down! And also, fuck Russian hacks!
Welcome back. After seeing the Infidel’s post, I added you to my blogroll and posted about it.
I’m looking forward to reading your new blog. Screw Putin and his orange troll.
The same thing happened to me at Bluehost a couple of years ago — a security hole in a WordPress plugin was used by Russian hackers to replace my site content with superficially-harmless and random-looking marketing content, including a homepage stolen from another site belonging to an entity with a name superficially similar to my site’s name. But Bluehost gave me no warnings and, when I pointed out the situation to them, they did not even pretend to care. Of course I fired them and migrated at once, but I lost some content. The lesson that I drew at the time was not to use WordPress. Now that we read of the relationship between Bluehost and WordPress, in the context of the Mullenweg sh1tstorm, we see that all of these things must be related.
So you’re, like, a major player in International Intrigue now? COOL!
Welcome back, Burr! You’re just in time!!
Glad you are back, my friend! You cannot trust those damned Russians. (After all, Putin endorsed Kamala!)
Welcome back to the land of the living (Blog subdivision 🙂
I have been missing your weekly round-ups of the crazy.
Great to have you back, Burr.