Okay folks, we're back up and running. Looks like it was a hack, a strange one at that (hacked at the styles - kind of an interesting approach). I'll look to upgrade this thing sometime soon, but need to talk to Denny a little more about it.

Enjoy your day.

EbbTide - are you using FireFox too?



*EDIT* - Okay, I think I see what happened with the styles, and I think (stress think) that should fix it. I'm going to install Firefox to see how it looks there. In the meantime, how we looking now?

Well, one of the nasty things the script kiddies do these days is hijack just a bit of your computing power. If they do it on enough computers they can start a really nasty denial of service attack on someone.

Plus, unless you're really computer savvy, you'll never know they're doing it. How do I know about it? Well, it happened to me and took me a little while to figure out it was happening. Not talking the DoS attack, talking the hijack.

Somehow, probably from something I downloaded, I got a bot on my computer. What the script kiddies do is find a script out on an IRC chat channel. They modify the script to do whatever kind of attack they are interested in doing. Using DoS as an example...

They've modified the script to log onto an IRC chat channel. Once in the chat room, they connect to the bot and the bot then goes out looking for every computer that's infected on the internet. The infected computer when started up notifies the bot on the IRC chat channel that I'm available. The bot then executes the script the kiddy has modified.

DoS attack is really easy to do, you just ping the IP that you want to attack. Now, a ping in itself is a very small amount of data being sent back and forth to the IP, but can be useful. Now imagine 1000 or more computers all sending that ping 1000 or more times to the IP. Suddenly, no data can get into the address or out.

Very nasty and I was extremely upset when I found out some delinquent was doing that on my machine. I finally fixed the problem and have since taken measures to never have it happen again. So far, 5 years later it hasn't.

Glad WorldWorks is back up and functioning even with the hack!

By the way, I'm a PHP programmer as well, so if you guys ever need help, I'm offering!

Skunk

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