The Shadow Of The Extremely Skinny Tandy Hills Thin Man Thinking About Gators, Ukrainians & Mesquite Needles

Yes, that is the Shadow of the Extremely Skinny Tandy Hills Thin Man in the picture.

It is coming up on 3 in the afternoon. It is 90 degrees, currently. I have had me one of those days, so far, that has me feeling kicked in the gut.

Pretty much all self-inflicted.

Everything was going fine til I came in from swimming. After that, til a little after noon, I was stuck being dumbstruck trying to figure out a confusing problem on my web server.

My one longtime reader may remember way back in 2009 when my websites were being attacked by Ukrainians. As soon as I could, I moved my websites from IX Webhosting to Gator.

I have not had any Ukrainian problems with Gator. But, IX Webhosting's control panel was far easier to use than Gator's. With Gator's I'm always thinking I don't really understand this stuff all that well. With IX Webhosting I never thought that.

Anyway, after hours of straining my seldom strained brain, I figured out what was causing the problem. Short version. User error. Sort of.

My plan today had been to go to the Memorial Day BBQ at the Paradise Center, after hiking the Tandy Hills. When I was having my morning vexations I got a text message from Paradise Center hoping I could make it.

I made it late to the hills. Did not get back here til well after 2. I'm in no mood to do anything but eat the pizza that I just took out of the oven.

On an extremely happy note, someone did some brush clearing on the Tandy Hill's trails. I got poked by a Mesquite needle blowing in the wind a couple days ago. Those Mesquite needles are wicked weapons. I was pleased to see that the Mesquite that had attacked me had been summarily dealt with.

It is now time to eat pizza.

Ukrainians Save Me From Brute Force Hack

That is a pair of Ukrainian soldiers you're looking at it in picture. I think I've mentioned the Ukrainians before. My webhost, which is based in the United States, has Americans handling customer support if you call. But if you submit a support ticket, it goes to the Ukrainian support center in the Ukraine. The Ukraine is now a country. It used to be part of the Soviet Union.

The reason I submit a support ticket rather than call is because it takes less time and usually eventually the Ukrainians solve the problem. A lot of seriously fractured English is usually involved.

I don't remember if I mentioned it or not, but recently one of my websites developed a problem so serious that Google pretty much banned it from the Internet.

So, I contacted the Ukrainians, who I'm sure work in a very secure bunker likely guarded by soldiers like you saw above. Saturday they went right to work on the problem. This morning I got a message from Dmitriy Pavlov. It is not as fractured as they often are. However, following Dimitriy's instructions did not work, because his instructions did not match with the reality on my webhost control panel.

Below for your confusion is Dimitriy's message in which I learn I was hacked by brute force....

Thank you for waiting. Our administrators have completely cleaned your account from all malware. During investigation we have found that your account was hacked due to bruteforce attack on FTP. Due to not very strong FTP password hacker was able to get it and used FTP access for adding harmful code inside your files. To get more information you can check FTP logs in files ftp.logs and wrap.log, which located inside your FTP root directory. You will see that a lot of different IP address were tried to access your account. To protect your account we have already changed FTP passwords for all accounts. To get FTP access back you need to change passwords back. For creating FTP password we suggest to use some password generator like at "goodpassword.com". To change FTP password you should login at manage.9webhosting.com, then click manage button for your hosting plan. After this please click on FTP Manager icon and then click on little notepad icon nearly with caption "password".

Also we have found a lot of files and folders with unsecured permissions. Full list of them you can find in file permissions.list, which located inside FTP root directory. We are suggesting to use 755 permission mask for folders and 644 mask for files in your account. For checking/changing permissions please use following steps:

1 Go to webshell in your control panel
2 Find certain folder
3 Click on little folder icon left from folder name (or simple on file name)
4 At right side you will see permissions table
5 Choose needful permission mask
6 Click change

Kind regards,
Dmitriy Pavlov
Technical Support