Tag: hack

Why So Many Top Hackers Hail from Russia

Brian Krebs has an interesting post on “Why so many top hackers hail from Russia“:

Conventional wisdom says one reason so many hackers seem to hail from Russia and parts of the former Soviet Union is that these countries have traditionally placed a much greater emphasis than educational institutions in the West on teaching information technology in middle and high schools, and yet they lack a Silicon Valley-like pipeline to help talented IT experts channel their skills into high-paying jobs. This post explores the first part of that assumption by examining a breadth of open-source data.

Overall, not very surprising, but the details and references are interesting.  It seems a lot has changed since I graduated (back in 1995).

Via Slashdot, which also has some insightful comments.

Compromised!

It appears that this blog has been recently compromised.  Big thanks to one of the readers for bringing it up and letting me know.  Especially, since the compromise was hard to notice – one of the recent posts was modified with a blog of hidden markup that contained some SPAM links.

I am still looking into when and how this happened.  The blog is powered by the latest version of WordPress (2.3.3), but a few plugins were outdated (it’s been a month or so since the last update).  I have edited the post to remove the SPAM links and I’ve upgraded all plugins to their latest versions.  I’ll also limit access to administration interface by IP (yes, I know it’s easy to go around, but I think it’ll keep most of the bots out).

If you have any other suggestions on what and how to do, please let me know via comments or directly.