Back Online

After getting my DNS listing hijacked and redirecting to an annoying "Power Acai Berry" scam, I'm finally back online and running after a quick back-and-forth with tech support.  Turns out they were running outdated DNS servers leaving my site vulnerable to such an attack.  Though, none of my files were harmed or touched at all rather, the attack basically changed what IP address "andrewchow.com" redirected to.

Good thing I have my entire blog posts backed up.  Woot woot.

For those who are computer illiterate, I'll draw a parallel:  Just as viruses and bacteria evolve to adapt against our anti-biotics, vaccines, and treatments; computer hackers work ever so diligently in finding new security holes while the developers work quickly to patch those security holes up.  Thus, it is important in both cases to be at the cutting edge and up-to-date to stay ahead of the game.

To prevent this from happening again, I've blocked probably 95% of IPs from China from accessing this site.  It's unfortunate but necessary since China is one of the cyber-crime safe havens in the world at the moment (many spammers/hackers/etc. come from there and waste bandwidth).  The recent influx of Chinese visitors according to my site logs and subsequent DNS hijack is no coincidence.  The list of IPs I have used were obtained from countryipblocks.net and if you run your own site and wish to do the same, the list is there.

"China is currently leading the world in malicious activity and botnets, followed by Brazil, Russia, India, Korea, Viet Nam [sic], Ukraine, Turkey, Italy and Argentina." -countryipblocks.net

I don't know see how andrewchow.com is worth the effort in terms of size and traffic when there's juicier targets for hackers to attack.  Though, most of these are automated bots.