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June 4, 2007

A Note to My Abnormal Readers

Blogging will be even lighter than usual over the next couple of days. Shirley and I are celebrating our forty third wedding anniversary. While we don't have any great plans, we will be taking an extended day trip tomorrow and doing I'm not sure what on Wednesday, our actual anniversary.

On another subject: the other day I reported what I thought at the time was a router problem. It turns out that our router was resetting as part of a defense against a very malicious and persistent attack on our system. I was able to identify the source and report it to the ISP whose client was hosting the offending software. After about a week of working with the ISP the problem seems to be fixed. This was a real pain, but except for a good deal of my time and considerable anxiety, nothing else seems to be lost or harmed.

However, I really don't think that all is well that ends well, at least not in this case. The ISP took days to get their client to remove what was certainly a Trojan in their server. It also required a good deal of input from me. I think they hoped the problem would go away. Several years ago, when I had a similar, but less malicious, Trojan in my server, my ASP shut me down twenty minutes after sending me an email notification of the problem. I had to make special arrangement to go online for ten minutes(!) to download diagnostic software. After I removed the offending software from my server, I had to explain in considerable detail what I had done and why there would no longer be a problem before they re-established service. And then I was on ten-day probation. I just don't feel that the ISP hosting the server that attack me was all that proactive. At one point, I was even told that they didn't want to upset their customer over this. This is scary stuff and I believe ISPs should work very quickly to resolve the problem rather than let it drag on for several days.

By the way, I got my Trojan when I downloaded and installed some freeware. My scanning software was out of date and I paid a price for it.

Posted by Duane Smith at June 4, 2007 8:35 PM | Read more on About Me |

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Posted by: Christopher O'Brien at June 5, 2007 11:36 AM

Posted by: afarensis at June 6, 2007 2:43 PM

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