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Having spent the best part of 40 years looking through a viewfinder of a stills or video camera, sitting in front of a computer editing photos or videos, producing websites and managing content and social media accounts for organisations or individuals, it’s a very strange feeling to now say “I’m retired".

Despite no longer taking on commercial paid work, it’s virtually impossible to suddenly stop what you’ve been doing for the best part of your working life so, for the past few years I’ve been taking on work on a ‘pro-bono’ basis for church, charity or voluntary organisations. I hope that my experience, skills and equipment can now be put to good use by those who perhaps, don’t have the budget or funding to produce what they want or need for their media requirements.

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Coincidence or malicious attack?

Filed in: Websites |Hack attack written by: Dave Farrants
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I built and maintain, a website for a good friend of mine www.globalpassion.uk, Tony is a missionary and bible teacher supporting Christians in Serbia. As a ‘one man band’ keeping operating costs down is important and I’ve managed to keep his website hosting costs to a reasonable level.

This year the hosting company raised the annual cost by 37% to £84, another hosting company I use (HostingUK) quoted £63 for two years, essentially half the price I was paying for the same features and benefits…….

An email exchange with one.com advising my decision to move, got a reply with a ‘one time offer’ to stay for a price of £67, I declined the offer and advised them I would move hosts, they replied again with a less than warm response and sent me a termination link, even though I still had over 9 weeks hosting left and paid for.

Tony had just returned from a trip to Serbia and sent me a report and photos to update his website which I did. The following morning I looked at his webstats (statcounter.com) to see how many people had visited to read his latest report, I was amazed to see over 150 visits, I refreshed the page to check again and in the space of just a few seconds the total had gone up to 250 hits, another refresh and the total was now 350!

It was obvious there was some sort of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, another refresh and it was up to 650 hits, my first thought was to block the IP address, looking in the webstats I found the offending IP address (somewhere in the Alsace), copied it and pasted it into my .htaccess file as a ‘deny from’ on the hosting server, another refresh of the webstats and it was now over 900!

Checking again a minute or so later and the attack had stopped with no more visits to the site, I checked throughout the day, no more visits from Alsace and the stats reverted to what I would normally expect for Tony’s website, somewhere between 12 and 20 hits a day.

Christianity is tolerated but not widely accepted in Serbia, was it a coincidence the attack happened a few hours after I posted Tony’s report on his successful trip?.....Or could it have been someone closer to home?
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Tags: Websites,Hack attack

 

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