Archive for May, 2009
Good Advice
I visited Amsterdam during the start of the week, and while I did indulge in some of the city’s many vices I did not invest of the services of the many beautiful women in the windows of the Red Light District. I would like to think it may have been because of this bit of advice I found in the official Amsterdam tourist guide.
“If you visit one of the women, we’d like to remind you, they are not always women”
I think there’s a take home message for everyone right there.
Queens Day
Just a few photos from Queens Day. I’ll write up a proper article and update this post in a couple of days. For now: I am off to Amsterdam!
UPDATE: Alright now! I am back from a great couple of days in Amsterdam. I hope you’ve all had time to peruse the photo gallery and are probably wondering what the hell was going on. Well let me tell you.
Queen’s Day or “Koninginnedag” in Dutch is (usually) a day of great celebration in the Netherlands. Occuring every April 30 it is one of the countries few national holidays. It celebrates the Queen’s birthday and unites the whole of the country in revelry. While not exactly the current Queen’s birthday (she was born on January 31st, making me and my Aunt Beatrix birthday buddies) it has a bit of history surrounding its position on the calendar. Originally the celebrations were held on August 31st, starting from 1885 in celebration of Princess Wilhelmina’s birth, but was later moved to April 30, the birthday of Queen Julianna. Since then Queen’s day has been on that date, making it more of a celebration of the Royalty than a specific birthday.
The day is full of celebrations. Markets are opened everywhere, turning the country into one massive garage sale. Everyone decks themselves out in orange and the partying begins. This years celebrations were marred by a certain idiot driving a Suzuki Swift through a crowd of people killing himself and six others in an attempt to attack the royal family. Most of the official events were canned although a lot of people still hit parks, clubs and bars not to be dissuaded from partying by the horror of the morning.
Myself, Martine and a few of her friends found ourselves at a big party in Rotterdam, which is where all the photos came from. The girls were full of energy garnering a lot of attention from other party goers. I didn’t drink all that much, had some lunch and Martine and I were back in Waddinxveen by around 9pm. I had a great Queen’s Day and I can throughly recommend checking out Holland around April 30th!
Hacked
Over the weekend you may have noticed that this site was suspended. My hosting service only issued me with a brief email saying “Due to scripts taking too long to execute the website was disabled”. This email was not entirely helpful, and after repeated support emails that went without reply and a few calls to the support line I found I could not get my site reactivated until today.
I decided to do a little research myself while my site was done. As I had no access whatsoever to any part of my hosting (logs, emails, cpanel, etc etc) I had to rely on what little data Google Analytics recorded before the site was suspended. I found something quite interesting.
Google recorded a bunch of hits to the following URL:
/_vti_logs/VideoEclusivo.avi.mpg.exe
Obviously something dodgy going on. Once I had access to my site again this morning, the first place I went to was this _vti_logs folder. In it I found a phishing site and a PHP email generator. I contacted support at webcity but they were unable to tell me who put these files on my site and seemed uninterested in helping me further.
Snooping around the files I found a few things. First that around emails 6089 were generated by the PHP script. Second the script was written by “MurdeR” who’s website is Diosdelared.com . This does not mean this phishing site was put there by this character though. Third the scam seems to be a phishing site masquerading as “Moviestar” a Venezuelan phone company.
Apart from the lack of support I got regarding this matter, the most frustrating thing is that this scam seems to have worked quite well. The phishing site received thousands of hits, with 2397 being to the exe which is obviously a virus/trojan. Out of the 6089 emails that “Murder”‘s script reported it generated almost half landed with people who fell for the scam. Quite scary when you think about it. It is quite obvious from the URL (www.agamersodyssey.com/_vti_logs/index.php) that the user had come to something unaffiliated with Moviestar, but nearly 50% of the people who received this poorly crafted email clicked on the link AND entered details.
My hope for humanities future continues to decline.
I have kept a copy of the phishing site incase anyone else would like to look into this issue. Please contact me if you need more info, or if you can provide any info that would help track down the perpetrators.