TopShelf TG Fiction in the BigCloset!
Some sort of attack brought the server down at about 8:15 PST this morning. Bob and I are working on figuring this out, so the site may go up and down a bit for awhile.
Hugs,
Erin
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Comments
Side effect
Looks like BC was brought down by a reaper attack on the Promethean Universe website. This may not have been malicious, the software running the PU site is notoriously slow-witted and a lot of calls to pages there might easily have brought it down. I've temporarily killed the PU site while we figure this out but BC seems to be running fine.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
What the???
What is the Promethean Universe?
They know they can survive
Agree with Witheld.
Can you translate when you get a moment?
Babblefish confirms that this is no more
intelligable to me in Mandarine, but is
sounds fascinating.
Does a Reaper program harvest pages?
Sarah Lynn
Reapers and Prometheans
Reapers are automated programs designed to download lots of webpages. Also known as spiders, robots and crawlers. Google uses a species of slow crawler to index webpages for their search engine, and two more to run with their ad service. A reaper is a crawler running at high speed and downloading pages as fast as possible, usually for some private purpose like setting up a mirror site -- or more evilly, harvesting email addresses. No one can harvest email addresses off of BC, BTW, it's protected from that.
It's possible to write a murderously effective reaper with just one line of code if you know your target. It's almost sure to cause problems on the victim website because it will ignore all commands to well-behaved crawlers -- it's not bright enough to understand them.
The Promethean Universe was a small website where I kept notes about my superhero world with dossiers on all the characters and a timeline, etc. It ran on a small, clunky version of the wiki-type software that Wikipedia runs on. It's been taken down to stop the reaper from having a target --which apparently worked.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Hmmm, I'll have to remember
Hmmm, I'll have to remember this when I'm saving a site into PDF for personal use.
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May the Stars light your path.
Joy
Duh!
'Whoosh' straight over my head.
Angharad
Angharad
Reapers... This sounds like something...
We used to call it by another name about 20+ years ago except from what you say a reaper is much faster. Is it designed to chase a specific target then?
Maybe I should move all my story notes off-shore (out of my computer) to protect them. Will a good anti malware program catch a reaper? I'm running a German written program and lately it has been fending off about three or four times as many problems as I was seeing just a couple of months ago. This is scary stuff were talking about here.
God Bless You All...
That type of program doesn't
That type of program doesn't work on personal computers with a firewall set up, like XP and Vista have. It only works on webservers and domains where it's designed to be open for people.
So your personal stuff on your PC is safe (so long as you take basic precautions), it's the stuff that you have HERE or on other websites that is vulnerable.
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May the Stars light your path.
Joy
The program doesn't..
So although I have a server at home which is running the twelve universe programs which are my stories, because it doesn't access the internet it is safe? So only what is on my notebook would be vulnerable anyway and the XP firewall plus the German anti-malware will likely keep the bugs at bay?
I think that's what you're saying. I hate bugs, whether they're reapers or harvesters or ???? I wish I could write a program that could track them and infect their sender's machine with something... Like the fickle finger of fate or ???
Teddi (when I was more than a "few" years younger, )
God Bless You All...
Pretty much
As long as your server is not connected to the internet and any machine that is has a firewall and some anti-malware, you're safer than houses. You could get in trouble by doing something dumb like opening a dangerous attachment in an email but that's like letting the guy with the chainsaw and the hockey mask into the parlor, :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
If I'm understanding what
If I'm understanding what you are saying correctly, you have a server for your personal home network, right?
Unless it's running a WebServer, and you would know if it were, it is NOT vulnerable to these kinds of harvesters. Your Personal PC would be safe, like any other personal PCs would be that are using the same server.
See, a webserver goes out and actively broadcasts to the Internet that it is there, and serving web pages (content/stories) to anyone who wants to see them. That's its purpose. That is what bigcloset.us does, that's what my webserver does for my websites. But just having a FILE server for your home network, like you have at work with many PCs accessing a common server to access files on there, that is not the same thing.
(Sorry, can you tell my profession is in Information Technology?)
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May the Stars light your path.
Joy
sorry I'm playing the part of a dunce...
I may do a lot with computers but don't understand all the negative stuff that people come up with...
OK... my home SERVER has a five disk RAID array. Each of these is in excess of 300 GB. It is a dual processor 64 bit (true) machine (all $4700 worth) and is running twelve concurrent programs (plus all the extra stuff) which are the programs I use for my universes... Within each universe I may have as many as another dozen stories running...
This Server feeds a wireless system which I may access from anywhere in the house or nearby outside (like on the patio). There are six computers which are allowed to access. The access feed is encrypted 256 bit two key plus...
Now this Server is the "heart" of my system and it routinely downloads the dailies to 9 GB DVD disks along with assorted other "stuff" (have yet to come close to filling a DVD).
The only computer which accesses the I-net is my notebook and I have a very agressive anti malware package on it as well as on the Server.
Soooo.... From what you are saying.... I'm safe???? Oh sorry, the server is running Linux... the interpreter is also in Linux
God Bless You All...
Yes, you are fine.
Yes, you are fine.
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May the Stars light your path.
Joy
Better than some commercial setups
:)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
If you're accessing it from
If you're accessing it from elsewhere in your house, then it's connected to the net. Presumably your firewall is keeping outsiders out of your servers. If it isn't, then you need one.
I've heard of a few people who have checked their traffic and found that they're being eaten up by web crawlers. They've gone to the extent of finding the common ones and blocking them, and also prohibiting anyone who's accessing the site too rapidly by IP address.
Xaltatun
I think I was happier when I was ignorant of..
the possibility of all these malicious things. I remember when hard drives failed because they failed. Not because they were eaten alive by some bug...
God Bless You All...
Personal security
Reapers go after servers. Invasive malware that goes after private PCs hooked to the internet is an entirely different sort of thing, unless you're running server software on your home machine. Good firewalls and some sort of malware protection should be enough for a home PC. Macs can usually get by with just a firewall as they are not common enough to make good targets for the crackers. No one has ever yet written a truly dangerous virus for the Mac.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.