Security

Political Site Slow to Disclose Credit Card Theft

There's an ongoing dispute between the right-wing group ProtestWarrior and a left-wing "hacktivist" accused of breaking in to their servers and accessing the credit card information of 5,000 customers of the group's online store. While that allegation is under investigation (no charges have been filed), ProtestWarrior makes an unusual admission: They discovered the possible theft of customer credit cards in February, but didn't tell any customers until July 5. The reason we haven't made this ... (read more)

2005/07/14

Serving Files with a Cache to Save Cash

Some podcasters and other publishers who serve large, high-traffic files have begun using the Coral service to keep from going offline or going broke. The iPodder client added support in March. Coral's a network of several hundred servers that can store and serve copies of any file on the web. To offer a file via Coral, all you have to do is add .nyud.net:8090 to the host name in its URL. Here's an example -- the trailer for the underappreciated Brat Pack thriller Bad Influence starring James ... (read more)

2005/05/14

Server Attacked at Random

My server has been under attack for three days by a user in Colorado who requested the same URL 8.3 million times (and counting). The user, making simultaneous connections from eight IP addresses in a block controlled by Time Warner Telecom, requested a URL on URouLette that redirects to a random web site -- as many as 30 requests a second to a PHP script that made a MySQL database connection. I'm guessing the motive was to acquire web addresses for e-mail harvesting or some other form of net ... (read more)

2005/04/06