Kimler Adventure Pages (http://randsco.com)

Randsco Hacked - Hackers gained FTP access and uploaded two .htaccess files, both attempted to redirect search engine visitors to another website. One failed, the other was successful. Read the postmortem on how approximately 15,000 Randsco visitors were hijacked over 5 full days, last month.

Hackers Hijack Search Engine Visitors for Five Days

Hacked Stats - Hackers hijacking search engine visitors had an impact on the August stats. (Columns represent the number of visits, pages, hits and bandwidth used, for each day. Normal averages for Randsco are 3577, 8278, 129882 and 1.33 Gigabytes, respectively). For five full days, the number of visits dropped from about 3500/day to around 700 per day.

This wasn't the first time our web server has been hacked. Last year, while we were hiking the West Coast Trail, Randsco was hacked, along with everyone else on our (then) shared server.

What is it about hackers? They seem to know when you're away on vacation and nowhere near a computer! Grrr.

Fast forward a year and we're now on a VPS host. This time, (as far as I know), it was only Randsco that was hacked.

For five full days in August - and a couple of partial days - all visitors clicking through to Randsco from a search engine, weren't connected to Randsco. Instead, they were automatically redirected to a spammy website that was selling "anti-virus software". The site loaded a "virus scanner" and a JavaScript alert window, which popped up in the middle of the screen. Closing these pop-ups was also difficult, as they spawned further pop-ups.

Visitors typing in a Randsco address into their address bar, weren't affected. The hackers were targeting major search engine visitors only (Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc.)

I don't know if that website was legitimately selling marginalized software or if it was a ploy to get unwary visitors to download something malicious. One is definitely worse than the other, but for me, a moot point. The fact that hackers were successfully able to redirect search engine visitors, was an egregious violation of our privacy and goal of providing helpful, relevant content and a positive visitor experience.

To learn more about how hackers gained access and what they did (a postmortem, if you will) ... carry on.

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This is as close as it gets to an "About Randsco" page. Readership sits at 85,000 unique visitors a month (Jan 2008). Reasons why, what's popular, monetization, Interent penetration & the future of Randsco are all discussed.

Randsco: 86,500 Unique Visitors During January

On Growth: Nearly 15% of all the visits Randsco has ever had, came last month.

-Awstats     

"Randsco" was born early in 2005. It was a blogging experiment that came about after acquiring a domain name and moving to a shared hosting company. Before that, we had maintained our websites at GeoCities, a free online host. In autumn of 2004, GeoCities changed their advertising and because the new method impacted the visitor experience, we made the leap to an inexpensive ($5/month), shared host.

Randsco Growth: The graph shows how readership has grown. The graph was made during October. Then, we had 375,000 all-time visitors (hence the 1/3 of a million served). At the end of January, our all-time visitor tally is 614,000. Before the year is out, we'll have served over a million readers!

Randsco started as a means of documenting our lives (primarily for ourselves, but also for family and friends). Additionally, it allowed us to share our love of backpacking, cycling & adventuring with like-minded people.

Wow, have things changed. We still document our lives, keep friends and relatives up-to-date and share our adventures, but Randsco now serves up much more:

• A word-of-mouth web development business.
• XHTML & CSS articles & techniques
  • (e.g., Photo-Caption Zoom & Pop-Info)
• Web Articles
  • (e.g., Preparing Photos & MSIE z-index)
• Informative Articles
  • (e.g., Alberta Oil Sands & Canadian MERs)
• b2evolution Support
• Book Reviews
• Humor

Because Randsco has been (sorta) monetized, we've recently moved to a $50/month VPS host. Hopefully this will result in a superior visitor experience (stability & page load speed).

Readership growth is due to a number of factors: worldwide Internet penetration, benefits of a blog tool, increase in SPAM and (last but not least) valued content. To find out a bit more about monetization, what articles are the most popular, worldwide Internet penetration & the future of Randsco .... read on.

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Last week was an interesting one, for this website. We were hosted on a dedicated server (till a HDD failure), moved back to our yucky shared host and then finally settled with a new VPS (Virtual Private Server) host. Learn more about hosting option (we've now tried them all).

Web Hosting: Free, Shared, Dedicated & VPS
We've tried them all. Which is right for you?

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Randsco SPAM stats for May and June. Over 45,000 visitors and nearly as many SPAM attempts. Some were successful. Graph, tables & a few oddities that stand out in the crowd are presented. See who broke through the defenses and why.

Barbarians at the Gate

We apologize for May's late SPAM report and we thank those that emailed us, asking about it. We were busy sorting out server problems, because the Randsco website was hit or miss for over a week. SiteGround (our hosting provider) was trying to fix hardware problems on their server. Finally, they bought a brand new server, moved everyone across, then told us we were consuming too many resources! Eye-veh!

Despite technical glitches, Randsco readership hit new highs during May and June, with each month logging over 20,000 visitors! Now that the website is stable again (fingers crossed), we have time to post the monthly SPAM stats. We'll cover the last two months - May and June - in this one report.

In April's report, we said that our perfect, SPAM-free record was broken by a single SPAM message. (Poor Bridget, desperate for human contact, left us a comment in which she said, "I want sex".)

May and June both, have yielded additional SPAM messages, though none quite as compelling as Briget's. By comparison, it seemed like the SPAM floodgates were open. It turns out that it was partly webmaster error and partly spammer success.

Does this mean our blocking methods don't work? How bad was the damage?

To see who's laughing now and why ... read on ...

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For the past few days, Randsco.com has suffered through a series of server problems, even accused of overloading the server! Read about our love of shared hosting companies

Shared Hosting Problems Beleaguer Randsco

It may very well be that we have outgrown any sort of shared hosting plan. We have grown weary of suffering through server problems, poor loading speeds, high server loads and sharing a server with 543 "who-knows-what-they're-up-to" others.

For six days in June, we waited for SiteGround.com (our shared hosting provider) to fix a server that was on the fritz. During those six days, our site was up and down more times than even Paris Hilton has experienced (well, maybe I'm exaggerating a tad, but you get the picture).

We monitor server loads and we witnessed loads in excess of 150% (how is that even possible)?

In desperation (and by using MSDOS FTP) we posted a warning to our main page - "Watch out! Slow loading site because of crappy shared server. Stay tuned for details."

At the end of the day, after a new server was obtained and Randsco.com (along with the other 543 other sites) moved to this fancy new, high-speed, better-than-sliced-bread server, we received an email saying that our site was using too many resources. Gee, were we somehow responsible for the greater-than 150% server load on the old server? I don't think so.

To our host's credit, they worked with us to optimize our website and we're hoping that our server woes are now behind us.

To read all about the sordid affair ... press continue ...

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