So, you’ve stumbled onto my humble little blog. Perhaps you are a Millenial wondering why most of your friends aren’t fully employed. Or wondering why ObamaKare is being shoved down your throat. Or why your generation is on the hook for a national debt that stands at $17 $18 Trillion and counting. Maybe you are scratching your head wondering why your President thinks Global Warming the weather is more worrisome than Islamic Terror. And perhaps you’ve started to become aware there might be something the corrupt and biased lame stream media isn’t telling you. The answer, to these and other existential questions, is ... the Left - specifically, the modern American Progressive. Think of this site as a portal to a richer understanding of this answer, a portal purposely designed with a consciously cock-eyed bent to keep it entertaining. Because the First Amendment is forever and the Internet never forgets. (Plus you better figure out FICA isn't the name of a Swedish bikini model, before she eats your entire paycheck.)

How to use the portal? You could dive into my archive*. I was most active here 2010-2012, but that matters not. How many times do I need to demonstrate the central point? To wit, the political / ideological Left is a menace to the constitutional republic and must be resisted lest the American experiment in liberty devolve into socialist dystopia. If it's the more pointed hand-to-hand combat of the comment board that whets your appetite, click the 'My Disqus Comments' widget. I continue to visit that world from time to time as a light diversion. Or you could browse through my blog roll. It's a very representative collection of center-right blogs, though hardly exhaustive. I can't do the political / ideology thing 24x7, and you probably can't either. Leave that to the hysterical, talking point chanting, mob agitating, race baiting, election stealing, gaia worshiping, straw man torching, Islamic Terrorist appeasing, organized Left (aka OFA, MSNBC, UAW, SEIU, Think Progress, Media Matters, most of legacy media, the politically correct faculty lounge, anybody who belonged to Journolist, anybody connected to Occupy Wall Street, anything funded by George Soros or Tom Steyer, their paid Internet trolls, and the rest of the usual Team Leftie suspects).

*Re-posting encouraged. No need to ask for permission. Just follow the commonly accepted convention of acknowledging this site as original source with a link back. That way, you leave the asking for forgiveness to me.

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Friday, March 5, 2010

After Action Report: Cyber Wars 2010

Immediately after rolling out of bed this morning, as I sometimes do, I checked up on the status of this blog.  I was greeted with a bit of shock to begin my day today.  When I clicked on the link to my blogspot, it briefly flashed on the screen and then random unexpected web sites started appearing.  Being an advanced ape above all (time to shamelessly plug the Kinks' masterpiece "Apeman"); I naturally tried the same thing a couple of more times.  You probably don't need to be told I got the same result each time.  Still in advanced ape mode, my main thought at this point was "holy s**t, I've been hacked!"

Then I poured myself a cup of coffee and started exercising my god given gift of critical reasoning.  First of all, the damage assessment.  What else is broken?  Click around for a few minutes.   Nothing.  OK, good.  Virus scan.  All clean.  Good.

These measures were really just prudently paranoid precautions anyway, because before my coffee cup was even full I recognized and categorized the attack as a Domain Name Server (DNS) Redirection - a relatively beneign, if annoyingly childish, attack.

And I wasn't all that worried about losing work or data.  I specifically chose Google's Blogspot service for this project not only because it fit my budget (free); but also because Google may very well own the largest hosting infrastructure on the planet (just guessing).  This means I should have little to no worries about the security and availability of the network hosting my blog.  Plus the Blogspot service includes simple-to-use backup tools that allow me to keep backup copies of everything on separate media.

Here it was time to drive boy #1 to school.  The drive went well while I pondered next steps.  Traffic was lighter than usual for some unknown reason.

The Blogspot service also includes help resources that I have found to be actually helpful.  A couple of searches, some reading, a little critical reasoning; and it became apparent the security hole was in all likelihood created by the inclusion of a 3rd party widget.  So, I went into my Blogspot dashboard, and began methodically removing one 3rd Party widget at a time, and testing the effect in Preview mode.

Long story short - the attack surface came through the Homer Simpson Quotes 3rd Party widget.

So, either the attacker hates Homer Simpson, or someone with administrative rights to Homer Simpson Quotes hates LibertyAtStake.  And committed a First Amendment crime.

My new policy is to avoid including 3rd Party widgets on this blog.  The experience of my faithful readers will be slightly diminished unfortunately.  The anti-First Amendment forces in the Cyber Wars of 2010 will need to find another attack surface to silence this blog.

Click here to link to the Kinks' original Promo film for "Apeman."
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Posted by LibertyAtStake at 9:22 AM
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