Chinese Government Shows 'Interest'

It's no surprise that a lot of cyberattacks originate from the the 'excellent' People's Republic of China. Some of these attacks are funded by or even originating from the Chinese government. Well, the latter is definitely true.

My (private) ssh server is a point of interest to the Chinese government, since they are trying to get in.

Every couple minutes a possible break-in entry is recorded in my logs. I guess that they decided not to hammer the front door, in order to evade automatic blacklisting of the originating IP.

reverse mapping checking getaddrinfo for mail.zdpri.gov.cn [218.108.28.189] failed - POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!

I checked the IP and it seems to host the web-mail for the Zhejang prov. Development Planning & Research Institute [1].

I guess it's time to tighten the timers on blacklisting.....

B.t.w. The reporting on the IP was provided by Splunk. Excellent tool for digging in logfiles and reporting.

Morning Walk

A couple of (highly annoyed) cows I ran into this morning during a nice morning walk. Fog and sun... a nice combination.

More photos can be seen on my flickr page.

Beth Hart Showcase @ Amstelkerk, Amsterdam

Autographed CDMy gf won two tickets for the showcase for Beth Hart's new CD 'My California' for last Friday. I didn't quite know what to expect. I did know some of her older songs, and that's about it.

Since it was a showcase for her new CD, she didn't play much 'oldies'. Not that I cared, since her new album contains more than enough excellent material.

Below, one of her new songs 'Sister Heroine'.

Recorded with a Panasonic Lumix LX3

More photos from the showcase are available on my flickr page.

Comment Spammers Do Research

Lately, the comment spam rose exponentially. The is done by automated scripts, usually from compromised PC around the world. This way the original spammer will remain anonymous.

The last couple of days I noticed weird search queries (Google search referrers) in my logging;

Looks like someone (probably in the Hong Kong area) is searching the Internet for specific blogs (I guess SquareSpace blogs looking at the query) that contain certain words / fiels, indicating that commenting is allowed. These keywords match 100% with the field / words in and around the blog comment area. Shortly after these searches, the comment spam came pouring in.

At the moment, the only remedy against these spam comments is to screen every newly submitted comment by an editor, since the automated spam detection on the Squarespace platform is basically worthless. Too bad, since they rock at everything else.

Apple iPhoto Photo Album

For the last 5 years, I've been using the Apple iPhoto application to create my holiday photo albums (five so far). Some might find them too expensive, but I simply love the Apple iPhoto integration, the available templates, and ordering process. Worth every penny in my opinion.

The 46 page photo album of the Spain holiday arrived today. Time between ordering and delivery was thee work days (five if you include the weekend). Excellent, fast, service if I may say so.

The album was created with Apple iPhoto.

Warning: crappy low-light iPhone photo :-)Thankfully, the real thing looks much better.......

The photos seen in the album in the photo above is a 7 photo panoramic overview of Granada, Spain. Taken from within Alhambra.

Tequila

Really haven't got the words for this excellent spoof on the average American (drug) ad.

I just hope that these kind of ads stay away from the local continent (and I don't mean the spoofs). Some things are better left on the other side of the Atlantic.