Web Development
Blocking AzureCloud due to malicious traffic
I haven’t posted in a long time but I felt the need to mention this to anyone else who might need to consider it. There has been a significant uptick in malicious traffic to my website over the last few months and I decided to do some analysis of from where it is coming. A huge source of these probes (looking through logs there are hundreds and hundreds of 404s that seem to be looking for vulnerable software) are Microsoft IP addresses. Digging around, it turns out they seem to be Azure VPS instances. I opened tickets with Microsoft at https://cert.microsoft.com for several of these IP addresses but the tickets were closed within a minute with a generic response: “This report could not be validated, no action was taken.”
It seems others have had this same issue.
Since this is a personal website and I don’t really need to be concerned with corporate connectivity, I decided just to block the entire AzureCloud. You can conveniently download the list from here in JSON format. I blocked the AzureCloud network prefixes.
Good bye, Azure VPS.
Why it costs so much
If a client asks “Why do you charge so much for X hours of work?” simply tell them “You are paying me for the X hours of work and the 35,000 hours it took to learn how to do your project in X hours.”
New website launched!
A large ecommerce project of mine recently launched. The site is called Ridge City Media and they offer disc repair services, for CDs, DVDs and game console discs. If you have scratched or unworking discs, CDs that skip or won’t play, check out their site for excellent disc repair.
Cindy Lou’s Books website
It’s been a long time since I have had a new site launch, but just recently I designed and launched a site for a friend who was opening a used bookstore in honor of his wife who recently died from ovarian cancer. The book store, in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, is called Cindy Lou’s Used & Loved Books. You should go there and read about Cindy and what Mark is doing now.
Integrating WP in external PHP pages
I have several external pages that use the WP theme engine to wrap the content. I use the method found here, which worked great under WordPress 2.9.2. After upgrading to WP 3.0, these pages no longer worked as expected but instead generated 404s; it turns out the fix is rather simple.
Facebook ads malware
Not sure what is going on with Facebook but I logged on this evening and within two clicks, received a scareware/malware-type popup message. It said something about “Hey your computer is infected, Do you want to scan it now?” This was a Javascript popup message with an “OK” and “Cancel” button. I clicked “Cancel” and immediately the browser window was covered up with a fake Windows dialog box showing a progress bar and a flashing “Scanning!” prompt. I closed the browser immediately and noticed the URL of the malicious page. It was from (DO NOT LOAD THIS WEBSITE)
http:// 217.23.5.205/ index.html
The IP address appears to be owned by an outfit in the Netherlands.
This page had some simple attempts at Javascript obfuscation but essentially it covered up the browser window with a <div> that looked like an Explorer window with infected files. Bear this in mind while browsing.
Google thinks I’m a robot?
So Google thinks I’m a robot? I was doing a fair amount of searching because I had a server down and needed to fix it, but seriously?
Facebook boom
Good grief. Seriously, is it just me? Is the whole Internet crashing? Google, YouTube and Facebook in the last week.
