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security drill
Running a website, any website, essentially means you need to become a bit a security hawk.
Granted, I installed this website on a domain name that I registered over two decades ago and from which I have run various sites, subdomains, and web apps. If it isn’t in at least a dozen dark web databases I have utterly failed at self-promotion in those twenty years. But the downside of that success is that yeah, hours after I relaunched this site, there were hundreds of little knocks on the back door as various bots and hackers tried to see how tight the locks were set.
Hackers are an inevitability.
And I’ve been mitigating this by:
- adding various plugins that track sus behaviour and block sus actors from hammering against the wall and brute forcing their way through my defences
- hiding my login page
- disabling the default features in wordpress that automagically publish my login username as the writing credit in my posts and feeds
- setting stupidly strong passwords that mathematically should take longer to brute force crack than the age of the universe
It’s daunting. It’s daunting for everyone, even folks who are seasoned at this, knowing that just behind a fragile digital firewall is some bad actor with a bot farm and nothing better to do that try and break into your digital backyard.
And it’s neither fun nor seemingly fair, but it is normal enough that its not worth panicking about.
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spring cleaning
My house is twenty years old next month, and with any time one lives somewhere for two decades there comes the inevitable accumulation of clutter in the basement.
As with many people, we have that room downstairs where reside archeological grade relics from our days passed. Boxes sit where they were packed a dozen years ago and never since opened. There is a corner devoted to baby and toddler kit that we just couldn’t bear to discard or sell. And of course we saved all those scraps of surplus carpet and boxes of extra laminate flooring and spare ceiling tiles, all from when we renovated and… you never know what you might need later.
The internet as a common public platform for business has been around for longer than twenty years and like my house, some folks have been occupying their digital real estate for decades.
Likewise, I suspect there are a lot of business websites out there with more digital clutter in their metaphorical server basements than most would care to admit. Most of this might be packed tightly away in boxes and spare rooms which will never see the light of day, but unlike my basement it may only take an unscrupulous visitor mere minutes to pack themselves up a copy of all that clutter and disappear into the dark corners of the web.
And I don’t need to tell you that your old business information may be much more valuable on the black market than my box of old charging cables and power adapters. We probably all could spend the weekend doing some spring cleaning.