Tech

I'm an international hit (and you are too)

Alex Popell

• 3 min read
I'm an international hit (and you are too)

Thank you all so so much, I can't believe that I've had this much interest in my blog in such a short time.

So to my most active proprieters, I just have to say, from the bottom of my heart, 01000110 01010101 01000011 01001011 01010101.

Why? While I've had 385 "unique visitors" at the time of writing, a significant chunk (probably 98%, I'm working on some cooler analytics) are malicious robots.

Like this, except they look more like boxes with cool LEDs

In fact, all of your home internet connections are constantly being hammered on by these bots, who will coldly scour the internet for vulnerabilities until the heat death of the universe.

My biggest fan

My all-time biggest fan hails from Poland, known best for its beautiful cities, picturesque castles, and Pope John Paul II. This fan is coming to my network from what seems to be a cloud storage provider in Warsaw (a computer, in a building full of computers that someone pays to have a company run while they execute commands from their homes):

Here's the login portal for their server (pretty stylish, but I like mine better):

I've had the pleasure of serving them 119 times from Nov. 8th-Nov. 12th, 2020:

Unfortunately, they weren't here for my hot opinions and dry wit, but rather to guess (poorly) at the kinds of things I might be running on my server and trying to login, lock me out, and sell my data back to me.

  • The orange rectangle shows what they are trying to reach (the full list is thousands of lines long).
  • The red oval shows an example of them trying to reach https://apoplol.xyz/phpMyAdmin3/index.php?lang=en

They're hoping I'm running phpMyAdmin3 (I'm not) and left a default password (I never do), or hoping they can use one of the many exploits available for this 10+ year old software.

They're trying to hack me. They're trying to hack you. And worst of all, no humans will ever know my cool opinions on stuff (except my dad).

Hi dad

I think I can make peace with this reality, so I've decided to move past it and limit my website to be accessible from Canada, the States, the EU, Great Britain, and Australia.

This has devastated my daily numbers

Take Home Message

  1. Don't use the same password on multiple sites.
  2. Don't use shitty passwords. Use a password manager and have it create strong, secure, random passwords.
  3. Realize that without a VPN, the person running a website you visit knows your rough geographical location, when you accessed which parts of their site, which device you used, and that's only if they don't put any extra effort into tracking you.
  4. Keep it real.