Son. Of. A. Bitch.

I’ve tightened security over the last few months, starting with the alert about WordPress vulnerabilities, and it sounds like whoever succeeded did so several months ago. That’s no reason to be complacent, of course. Time to review security.

Damn.

a few months ago, in the midst of a spam storm, I began to get a lot of spam on my registered e-mail, all of it in ideograms of an oriental nature. Was curious if it was related. They are rare now, once the filtering kicked in to watch for them.

Anyone else getting these?

I don’t think their software takes into account traffic, it just pings sites until it finds one which responds the standard WordPress URL for login. It’ll mindless pound us and just as mindless pound wordpress.com and its millions of blogs.

The password is probably the key to freely posting spam, and possibly harvesting email addresses to spam. I don’t think we’re getting any particular attention from the panopticon state, which in any case can freely read the posts and using metadata, track the poster back to his/her IP address and thence to an identity.

The Zone has come to the attention of the State security apparatus in the past, but it was pretty routine–I once had to vouch for the person posting some intemperate remarks as just a “hothead” and not any real threat.

Speaking of those “national security letters”, they’re known to have a clause forbidding the recipient from ever even acknowledging receipt of it, let alone disclose the comments. That’s pretty evil, in my judgment. So let me go on record right now as declaring that I have never received a national security letter and am not currently gagged by one.

I recommend asking me about that periodically, to see if my answer changes because I’ve become gagged. Silence can communicate a lot.

Doesn’t their software recognize the low volume of traffic through here? You’d think it wouldn’t be worthwhile (politically or commercially) to hack the Zone, not that many people come here.

Are we talking “posting” passwords or “admin” passwords?