A Series of Unfortunate Hacks

First!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

whoop whoop!! 2nd
god damn those ruskies.

What complete and utter arseholes…good luck with your battle and hopefully you will emerge the successor.

#4 best ever. Woot! =o)

in soviet russia, computer hacks YOU

I am so tempted to post some made-up spamlike comment.

Maybe the Russians were upset about DI talking about how contaminated their country is with nuclear waste? Of course, I don’t see how selling gambling and male enhancement products would solve that issue.
Maybe we can have our own DI branded spam:
*Is your USELESS KNOWLEGgE LAcKING? INcrEASE YOUR KNOWELDGE!!!! WITH Damn Interesting!!1!! *

We’ve had the same EXACT problem our Wordpress blog. Care to email me where you are hosted and what you did to fix it? Perhaps we could compare notes. Our leak seems to be plugged now, but I’d love to hear more about what you went through.

Oh, and BTW. I LOVE Damn Interesting!

apparently, they didn’t care for the “Lake” article…bruised sensibilities…boneheads…sheesh

Well, this is it boys. Digital combat…….toe-to-toe with the Ruskies.

Remember…their weakness is Vodka

Rape, pillage and destroy those Ruskie hackmoes.

Teh spammers are pissed off! With the speedy haste of molasses, the authorities are finally cracking down. Reverse-engineer them bastards to Siberia!

PS: Brothers Bellows you are in good company, they’ve been disrupting all the big sites, as well. ie: yahoo, msn, newsweek, comcast, flEbay…

check out http://www.imperva.com.. they have a nice web application firewall that will stop there non-sense… cheers!

Andy said: “We’ve had the same EXACT problem our Wordpress blog. Care to email me where you are hosted and what you did to fix it? Perhaps we could compare notes. Our leak seems to be plugged now, but I’d love to hear more about what you went through.

Signed, Russian dudes who still want to hack your site ;)

My Comrades and I have exact problems same as you! Please if you may, post it your internet site password and I will make fix of your site!

They’re just pissed off over Georgia! Gull Dern Reds!

I’m glad you’re back!! I’m looking forward to upcoming articles :)

I’m in the top 20 on my first attempt!!! Wahoo! this is the worst article I have ever read on this site….I love this site!

doofrat said: “My Comrades and I have exact problems same as you! Please if you may, post it your internet site password and I will make fix of your site!”

^i almost fell out of my chair laughing with that one.

Alan, Did you check to see if those Ruskie scientists …uh, hackers, had drilled a back door by way of Antartica. Could explain the contamination of your “virgin” domain…………

slafa said: “Wahoo! this is the worst article I have ever read on this site…I love this site!”

Are you absolutely sure this Russian hacking has nothing to do with a reaction to your “In Soviet Russia, Lake Contaminates You” article?

These Ruskies have got Penis Cheese.

puakz – if the ruskies responsible for this live anywhere ‘that lake’ …or numerous other cesspits of contamination it might be a case of “In soviet russia, glow in the dark smegma has you!”

They could save on glow-sticks at nudist rave-parties.

At least the Russians have become Capitalists.

So we got that going for us, which is nice.

Good work silencing the brayings of those money-grubbin’ tossmongers! Three cheers!

Like others this is also damn interesting…

Good luck to you all!

slafa said: “I’m in the top 20 on my first attempt!!! Wahoo! this is the worst article I have ever read on this site….I love this site!”

I agree–except this isn’t an article. It’s an update and a tease for all of us anxious readers. DI nonetheless.

God, that sucks. I had somebody hack my messenger account, and that was bad enough. I can’t imagine having someone hack a website like this, that you’ve spent so much time on. Good luck!

In all honesty, I would have loved to hear a Damn Interesting account/article on the sate of well, um, Damn Interesting. Or to be more precise I would like to hear about what they did and how you conter-acted their attempts. I would read with rapt attention.

Viseblood – me too, comrade!
You guys are about as subtle as a sledgehammer.

You mean I can’t buy my Viagra HERE?!?!?!?!

Let’s be honest Alan, you and the DI writers have been in a drunken stupor for weeks and have sent your soberest representative to post this update.

Alan,
all you need to do is post a story on the 1980 lake placid winter olympics and the ruskies will become so enraged that they will break thier own computers trying to reach through the screen to drag the story off this site. problem solved!

I hope they attack again, with all the money I made on their online casinos I bought enough penis pills to last me a whole year!

Alan:

Hilarious. One of your best jokes ever. Given the recent hacks on the Pentagon’s system and others, I fell for your ruse at first. Then, about two seconds later, I realized that I had been fooled. Good work.

Interestingly, blending established facts with fiction is a ploy that governments and spy agencies use when disseminating “misinformation” and negative propaganda. Perhaps you have a future with the NSA.

Dan Gillis said: “in soviet russia, computer hacks YOU”

In Soviet Russia Russians rape YOU

matthew1701 said: “Alan,
all you need to do is post a story on the 1980 lake placid winter olympics and the ruskies will become so enraged that they will break thier own computers trying to reach through the screen to drag the story off this site. problem solved!”

god, that’s perfect. Think Rasputin has been reincarnated as a teenage hacker intent on destroying the world???

Those jerks. Glad you’re back up and running though.

Go DI, crush the Ruski baddies. (They are pretty lovable otherwise). What they’ll do for a bottle of vodka!

doofrat said: “My Comrades and I have exact problems same as you! Please if you may, post it your internet site password and I will make fix of your site!”

ahaha

Adam Martin said: “Well, this is it boys. Digital combat…….toe-to-toe with the Ruskies.”

You mean this isn’t a friendly hack?

whats Russian for 1337?

The best sign that you have a successful website. Some one else wants to exploit it.

Thanks for letting us know. I was starting to worry that you wouldn’t be back.

“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph”

Sounds like a topic for a new DI article “How to hack a website”. Knowledge is power.
Watch your back for the Chinese too, as Cat Stevens sang, “there’a a lotta bad out there.”

allduerespect88 said: “whats Russian for 1337?”

If I remember it correctly, I believe that it is thus –

Since I do not know if the DI site has Cyrillic fonts I will also follow with a line in italicized English variants just in case.

In Russian One Thousand Three Hundred Thirty-Seven would be:

тысяча триста тридцать семь – TbICRYa TpNCTa TpNAUaTb CeMb

The English phonic of that would be:

Тысяча TbICRYa – Adeen Tysyacha (One Thousand)

триста TpNCTa – Trista (Three Hundred)

тридцать TpNAUaTb – Tridtsat’ (Thirty)

Семь CeMb – Syem (Seven)

Or you could say 1 3 3 7:

Один Три Три Семь – OANH TpN TpN CeMb

The English phonic of that would be:

Один OANH – Adeen (One)
Три TpN – Tri (Three)
Три TpN – Tri (Three)
Семь CeMb– Syem (Seven)

Then again, since my Russian was so poor or English accent too pronounced I would usually write the number or hold up fingers to be understood. ;)

друг ваш Apyr BaW the Don.

The Damn Hackers were Russian…. I generally have to do battle with the Chinese here. At least you are winning. I finally started banning Chinese IPs in large blocks to get rid of my problem, especially since I don’t do business with anyone there.

We’re all waiting for your next article of course.

Radiatidon said: “If I remember it correctly, I believe that it is thus –
Since I do not know if the DI site has Cyrillic fonts I will also follow with a line in italicized English variants just in case.
In Russian One Thousand Three Hundred Thirty-Seven would be:
тысяча триста тридцать семь – TbICRYa TpNCTa TpNAUaTb CeMb.”

I think ALLDUERESPECT88 ment L33t or Eleet (sometimes rendered leet, 1337, or 31337), also known as Leetspeak, is an alphabet used primarily on the Internet, which uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters. The term is derived from the word “elite”, and the usage it describes is a specialized form of symbolic writing. Different dialects of leet are found on different online forums.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

I wonder if the ruskies can read leet?

We can’t fault the reds for wanting to muscle in on our cool. They’re lucky to have a dial up modem with an old RadioShack Tandy computer.

Radiatidon said: “If I remember it correctly, I believe that it is thus –
…

Amazing. Just what the Google translator and various Russian alphabet pages said.

mercurial said: “Viseblood – me too, comrade!

You guys are about as subtle as a sledgehammer.”

lol ok

cool story bro.

WTF mate. Damn uninteresting bastards

kiwi-guy said: “Amazing. Just what the Google translator and various Russian alphabet pages said.”

Gee I’m glad that you are so amazed by the online translators. I did not think of using those. I actually used Langenscheidt’s Pocket Russian Dictionary, a neat little book for travelers needing a quick reference with both English to Russian and Russian to English. It also includes a neat back section on Russian pronunciation and grammar clues that I used. My poor book is over 10 years old and pages have fallen out. So it is not as complete as when I was using it.

But as with many travelers’ handbooks, it only gives a basic taste of the proper way to define and create a sentence, let alone a complete dialogue. I was trying to remember the proper way to define and compile the proper layout of the Cyrillic structure.

In no way was I fluent in Russian, just learned enough to squeak by. A typical tourist who whipped out his translation book when his vocal use of Russian caused locals to either give weird looks or to burst out laughing. ;) I always had a problem with remembering that certain letters would be either pronounced hard or soft depending on the letter following them. I guess it compares with Russian speakers problem with pronouncing the English “W” as a “V” since there is no equivalent in Russian.

The Don

Radiatidon said: “Gee I’m glad that you are so amazed by the online translators. …
The Don”

I wasn’t. I was amazed you were able to remember it exactly, but as you said – you used a book!

Happy USA Thankgiving Alan, Jason, Jarvisloop, Flo, and everyone else.
Wishing all a safe, peaceful, and loving holiday season.

Rush : check out their normal alphabet, they don’t _need_ leetspeak. ph34r cryllic

What confuses me most of all.. is WHY this site? Was it simply because it was vulnerable? I mean this site… i would be daring enough to say… is for moderate intellectuals… people who would not click on gambling ads etc etc. Whatever the agenda glad to have you back!

p.s. I hope you dont think that this post counts as an article. Get crackin!
p.p.s. The 2 year anniversary of the day I paid for your book is coming up!

The only foolproof way of defeating Russian hackers is with pie. The rest should be obvious.

Uh, while I am nearly blind now, and a computer idiot, maybe I can bring a bit of a smile to the besieged crew of Damn Interesting. On this day of Thanksgiving, (which I have come to think of as also a day for mending fences) I wish also to ask the forgiveness of a chessplayer I was rather brutal with on the Martian thread. I was too rough, with not nearly enough cause.

To the troll living under the bridge, and to one of his friends, whose screen name is much like the sound of a dying tubercular victim coughing up his last phlegmy chunk of lung, my abject apology is written in bold letters on the period at the end of this sentence. (…and I see there is room left over).

To the Rooskies giving my friends here so much trouble, I send you the Hungarian pleasantry “Alofus bossomeg!” And to your moms, whenever they get done hoeing the potatoes, or whatever other “ho”ing they may do, “Alofus Ashegedbem.” …and when these delicacies are absolutely and fully digested, I grant my full permission to forward them on to be put in Putin, at whatever location seems most accessible. And because this is my day of apology, I must apologise to you Russian saboteurs as well. I apologise that my stroke struck the portion of my brain which housed virtually all the Russian Language I knew, and that I could not now make my remarks in your native tongue. Dasvedanya.

Now returning to a far more pleasant and interesting subject, there is a new blog for open letters to our incoming President, who has expressed regret at the loss of his Blackberry due to necessary Secret Service security restrictions. He feels he is in a restrictive bubble which confines him to contact with only the power elite. As far as I know, he is the first President who ever lamented that fact. The blog is called To Obama and is at
toobama.blogspot.com

Sheesh, computers are SO literal! I forgot to put in the
http://toobama.blogspot.com/

65th!!!!

In Soviet Russia, shit drinks YOU!

Maybe this is a topic for a new DI article – in parts of Russia, the sewer pipes were laid ABOVE the drinking water pipes, in the very same ditches… those pipes are now degrading… no wonder they stick to vodka, when there is only diluted s#!T on tap!!

This is my first post and I must apologise in advance.
Something compelled to do this.

Anthropositor, why would you post something as dreary as that on this site?
In assuming that you had something interesting to add, I read your entire comment. (3 of them actually but I mainly refer to the 1st.)

Thank you for wasting my time.

When is the next article???

I click here daily, but this site is SO thin on updates… come on. I could even think of some great article subjects.

Fukurokuji #67 : I can’t be bothered reading back in this thread to see what Arthropositor wrote, but if you’ve ever bothered to read other articles at this site, and seen Arthropositor’s contributions, I would be surprised if you don’t find many of them interesting and thought-provoking, whether you agree with his point of view or not. Apologising in advance hardly detracts from how hypocritical you are being in this instance.

SoxSweepAgain #68 : Writing articles of the quality of those found here takes significant time and energy, both for research and actual composition of the article.

This site is free (and notice there are no advertisments, so not even any advertising money to offest bandwidth costs alone) and whilst it may surprise you, the authors here do actually have other commitments in their life. I am very grateful that they donate their time and energy, where possible, to give us such great content & an environment in which to discuss the articles.

Also, given the time and effort needed to produce quality articles, surely that is better to enjoy the status quo, than have a steady and abundant flow of articles of poor quality – if that is more to your likeing, there is no shortage of places for you to visit online.

I am sure that suggestions for interesting topics are welcome, and I know that anybody can write and article and submit it for publication here, subject to review by the admins, of course. If you’ve got some great ideas, why not contribute something?

Sorry if I come across as harsh, but it irks me when I see people being almost rude and demanding for new content, when all the time+energy invested in writing articles, maintaining the site, paying for bandwidth & of course fending off the Ruskies IS GIVEN TO US FOR FREE!

I’m hard pressed to think of places where you can PAY for a flow of such fascinating and diverse material.

Thanks to all the DI team!

Anthropositor – my apologies for mutilating your screen name, I’ve been researching certain arthropods all day (in the process coming across stacks of really fascinating stuff out there about spiders – very worthy of a DI article or two!) & my fingers must’ve got stuck on autopilot :/

What happened to the stories? I miss reading damn interesting stuff.

To long between stories guys :(

I salivate in anticipation of a new article. GO GET THOSE CRAZY RUSSIAN BASTARDS!

I miss DI so much it’s driving me nuts. Nuts enough to go Rambo all over those Russian bastards. I will be a one man invasion force if you guys just say the word!

Rocdabom said: “I miss DI so much it’s driving me nuts. Nuts enough to go Rambo all over those Russian bastards. I will be a one man invasion force if you guys just say the word!”

I will join you if need some help.

Why did those Ruskies have to hack DI? Why?

Hope this helps allay some of the rampant fear, uncertainty and doubt in these posts:

1) The ‘attack’ is most likely automated. Many tools are available to scan for websites vulnerable to any number of attacks, and in turn modify them for the attackers purpose. It is very unlikely that this hack is specifically targetted at DI – they were simply vulnerable like Alan admitted, and hence a target.

2) Wasn’t the whole cold war thing about bringing down communism and enforcing USA’s ideologies on the world? This sort of carry on (SPAM and all related forms of making money online) is quintessential capatilism. We reap what we sow.

3) Russia and China are hotbeds of the ‘hacking’ culture for much the same reason. Any half smart kid in the USA or any other well developed country, can find themselves working for a legitimate organisation without hassle – now consider having the intellect and nowhere to ply your skills…you’ll do whatever you can to put the rice/potato/vodka on you and your family’s table. Unfortunately the only people hiring in many of these places are what you would deem “less than desirable” types.

4) SPAM and Spammers only exist because it is profitable.

5) Final unsolicited point. Be thankful that this appeared to simply be a ‘Spammy’ attack on the site. Many of the tools also plant viruses and their like on compromised websites, and simply visiting the site can be sufficient to become infected – we could’ve all been “pwned” simply by visiting.

Enjoy your surf ;-)

doofrat said: “My Comrades and I have exact problems same as you! Please if you may, post it your internet site password and I will make fix of your site!”

That’s just funny right there!

OK. If I have to fly to Russia with some brass knucks and beat these kids into the ground, I’m there dude. Bring it on. F**kin’ punks.

But no, we are sentient beings, we must use reason and logic to resolve disputes, violence is bad. Else we not not men but animals.

So: Russian kiddies? Use your powers for Good. Hack EVIL sites, not nice sites. Hack the American Internal Revenue Service. They suck. Hack the CIA. HACK THE DIA! Hack the Pentagon.

Don’t hack nice sites. Yes it’s easy, but it’s wrong.

Hack evil sites. Cripple them. Bring them to their knees. Do that? I’m your friend.

And don’t bother hacking me, I have no money.

Hey. Dudes. Russian kids. You’re smart. Be nice. Use your powers only for Good.

Wolverines!!!

Hi,
I am a lecturer in reputed university.I love the positive hacking.I know hackers are intelligent.But the misuse of any thing is not good.http://www.quranreading.com/ educational website.I always suggest to improve the education system all over the world.Thanks to share information

WOLVERINES! (if Patrick Swayze weren’t sick, this wouldn’t happen!)

I’m thinking that a strong Soacialist Russian State would have prevented this…

Damn rampant freemarket “everyone for themselves” capitalism.

ps…how do I log out if it wont let me log out by clicking the link?

yellowdingo, there’s a bug in one of the Logout links — the one at the bottom of the page. Go to the top right of the page instead; under Options, choose logout and you’ll be fine.

To all you detractors: Admit it, it was still Damn Interesting.

And some of these comments are hilarious!

I am very sorry our hooligans caused you trouble. Actually I don’t think you were attacked by hackers. They might have been the “K” dept. of the Intelligence. This is more likely to me.

That’s a damn shame, maybe you could spin it around on them and post their evil plans a la http://www.texxors.com/content/best-comment-spam.

You know, if you didn’t post articles titled “In Soviet Russia, *****”, you wouldn’t have such problems.

hahahahahah…you said erected!

Being a russian myself, it’s a pity to see so many people brainwashed into thinking that we are the cause of all the troubles internet has.

PS – KGB is still watching you )
Komrades, let’s drink vodka!

I’m surprised your hackers were/are in Russia.
For over a year I battled hackers from Romania, but the worst ones were several located in one province in China. I found out that one so-called ISP had 7,000 laptops devoted to hacking servers like yours and mine.
The troubling thing was that there seems to be no ‘official’ way to report these activities as illegal. The FBI will not even listen to you until you mention a dollar amount of the ‘crime’.

Odds are the hackers weren’t actually located in Russia. The probably just hacked vulnerable servers located in Russia and live in some other country – probably here in USA.

They may not even be from Russia. Smart hackers do their handy work while connected to the web through a proxy. Essentially making it appear as though the hacker’s IP address is from a different country. For example, I live in the United States but could use a Russian or Chinese proxy and appear that I am surfing from a computer in that country. Just wanted to provide more detail on post #92, as he is correct.

So as an above poster mentioned that he blocked all Chinese IP addresses from his website due to hackers, all they would have to do once they were blocked is go grab another proxy from a different country and get right back in.

It’s still easy to find where its initially coming from, packet shaping still leads to the originator. Proxies are just mirrors, however although the mirror isn’t you, you can still see the person in the mirror.

Fukurokuji said: “This is my first post and I must apologise in advance.
Something compelled to do this.

Anthropositor, why would you post something as dreary as that on this site?
In assuming that you had something interesting to add, I read your entire comment. (3 of them actually but I mainly refer to the 1st.)
Thank you for wasting my time.”

Of my last three posts, one was an apology for an excess of cruelty, (I occasionally got grumpy when I was blind, a trait that is still not entirely gone) one was about a blog which seemed a better idea than it was, and one corrected an error in the address of said blog.

download BotProof captchas at;
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/botproof-captcha-20/