30 December 2009

did blogspot just get hacked?

click picture to enlarge
last night we started a post about how new years eve will see a blue moon as well as a partial lunar eclipse.

we couldnt remember the name of the observatory out in lafayette, california that has lots of photos and information about the full moon.that we always try and link to.

so inside our dashboard we can search posts by keyword which we did to find an old post about the moon to get that link from.

when we clicked to view the post from the web we were surprised to see that we were instead redirected to the vietnamese website you see the screen grabs of above. also trying to visit the main url www.wesawthat.blogspot.com also redirected.

at first we thought that blogspot was under some kind of cyber attack and it would be over in a bit. then we thought that we should look at another blogspot.com blog and see if it was affected too.

the first one that came to mind was oyster @ your right hand thief so we jammed over to the dead pelican and scrolled down to click oyster. his blog was fine.

then we tried next blogging for a little while and those that came up were ok.

we tried the blog search and google to see if any blogs were talking about this. there were no recent posts we could find.

next we went to the blogger help forum to see if there was anything. we chose the "something is broken" discussion category to start. but there was nothing there either. there was one guy daryze who probably noticed the problem much earlier but didnt tell how he solved it.

so we started another discussion "blogspot.com redirecting to vietwebguide.com" it took a couple of hours, we were beginning to wonder if our blog was the sole target of mysterious vietnamese hackers and what did we do to piss them off? -- when someone with a similar issue posted a reply.

then a little while later another guy peter from south africa was experiencing the same thing. a few hours after that, another blogger yoddah said it was happening to him as well.

apparently what happened was that the vietwebguide.com domain had expired. because the script source was based from that domain and the domain was now dead, the script instead of doing what it was meant to do (block trolls and spammers by ip number) was now acting to redirect everyone to the domain which had been replaced with that domain parked notice. or something.

so no, blogspot wasnt hacked. it was just a simple script went bad that webmasters found handy to help keep trolls, spammers and nutters at bay. we'll miss it.
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related posts
  • pensacola news journal forum hacked
  • blogrolling.com website hacked

    • ====
    this is the complete url redirected to:
    http://code.vietwebguide.com/?fp=RG1y%2FCOxVg8FdtMUYn8c5tOt2QNH0iIGx4Q
    2zPRc8YgV%2BovYTGgLF5lWi2U%2Fr%2BVWhTDWQBa1g4jkb2UeLisy1A%3D
    %3D&prvtof=yNe14f3e%2FN5YdO4NUqtu9rMvUBIO8xw1Ke%2FekpM7GtY8J%
    2FzARwkNHJjPuZ%2Bjo5ksikbvZb9SjqPFRlLkjuOCPQ%3D%3D&cifr=1
    ====

    Posted by wst... at 09:11