edging forward

I've had to upgrade the network security at rashbre central again. There's been someone attempting to tamper with one of the lesser known rashbre web-sites and trying to add some code into a directory. It didn't work and I think they will have burnt fingers. I've got a log record, IP address and bizarrely a phone number for this errant stranger so 'matters are in hand', as they say.

The web-site is actually hosted in Germany, although at least part of their internet journey passed through America. So like the recent reports about PRISM, it's probably fair game to provide a small notification about it to NCCIC or CERT.

It's annoying having to spend time on dealing with these negative activities. It's big business of course. There's one set of people selling pointless search engine optimisations by attempting to drop links of their client's products sneakily into other peoples' websites.

Then there's the other group (or parts of the same group?) selling the antidote products.

Facebook and twitter create another market. I'm sure I'm not the only one to get spammed by people offering packs of 'friends' to bump up the numbers. It all sounds quite saddo, were it not for the 'number of friends/followers' being used to create indices of social weighting. Of course, Google and similar systems are wise to it all and eliminate most of the spurious counts from their calculations.

It's all quite topical with the discussions of government-based spyware at the moment, but I can't help wondering how they'd have the horsepower to make it all work for more than a group of targeted individuals. There must be a lot of Chloe O'Brians around to save the day.

And of course, judging by the person attempting to fiddle with one of my web-sites, the perpetrators try to hide behind various masking technologies.

Annoyingly, it means we are all encouraged to spend time adding those defensive layers like complicated frequently changing passwords, Captcha codes, moderation for comments, firewalls, firetraps, sandboxes and so on.

So no wonder we need ever bigger computers to write our documents. It's all the edge activity.