Author Archives: dontai

Git Workflow from the Beginning

Brilliant, is Git. GIT is a staging and deployment process and tool, for those working in a team simultaneously on the same project. While it is a bit daunting in the beginning, after you use it the process becomes second nature. I’m only starting, so it is appropriate for me to document my learning process, which might help others.

While git is used mostly for software development, where each team member can work on code simultaneously, it really facilitates team collaboration of any project. Two people can work on the same document, individually commit their work, and send it back to the server for someone else to approve and then merge.

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Hexo from the Beginning

Hexo is a tool that allows the writer to create a web site using markdown. The web site is made of flat files, without a database. This type of web site is extremely simple, efficient, fast and hackproof. Check out my Gitlab test page.

Node.js PPA
You need to install node.js, a software package that uses javascript. For me on Ubuntu 16.04 it was painful, because the install scripts from Nodejs.org did not work, and installed a back-level version, 4.2.6, vs the most current 6.9.5. Dave helped me install.

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Brute Force Login Attack, 2017 Feb 14

Happy Valentine’s Day, and someone loves me out there on the Internet, because they used a botnet to try to break into my site. You are very welcome, whomever you are, but I am trying to find out who is my secret admirer.

There are 12 IPs involved. The each try 2 times.
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.89 Safari/537.36

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Brute Force Login Attack: 2017 Feb 11

Yet another brute force attack that I would like to document. The first two, from China and India, are bad dudes.

UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0

42.62.11.58 s Forest Eternal Com Cn, Risk 10/10, spam, bots malware (200): Spam Zero-Day, Doc.Dropper.Agent-5664104-0

117.245.8.122 s Wimax Bharat Sanchar Nigam BSNL In, Risk 7.1/10, spam, bots, malware: Spam Zero-Day, Doc.Dropper.Agent-5664104-0

213.119.94.181 s Telenet Operaties Belgium, Risk 8.6/10, spam, bots, scanning IPs

They are banned, never to return with these IPs

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Parking Ticket, City of Toronto, Canada

Toronto parking ticket: Code No. 406, Park – vehicle without valid Ontario number plate properly displayed, Toronto, Canada

No, this is not my ticket. I was on a run and found it on the ground, stuck to some ice. Thankfully it is a plasticized paper, so when I ripped it off the ice it did not rip. In fact, it was in perfect shape. Here in Ontario for a vehicle you need to buy a vehicle number plate, and then yearly also purchase a validation sticker. Apparently you cannot park your vehicle on the street without the validation sticker. I have removed the street name.

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Freezing Rain, 2017 Feb 07, Toronto, Canada

Freezing rain in Toronto, Canada, 2017 Feb 07, 13:02. Photo by Don Tai

We are getting a good bout of freezing rain, as two storm fronts merge over the Greater Toronto Area. The first is warm and moist, from the Gulf of Mexico. The second is cold from the north-west. As they merge the warm one rises, dropping its rain. The rain goes through the cold front, which is lower than the warm front, chilling the rain. As it is below zero C the rain hits the ground and freezes. Freezing rain is very hazardous to walking, riding bicycles and driving cars.

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Pan China Brute Force Login Attack

It is always warming to see the two Chinas, the PRC and Taiwan, getting along. Today they ganged up and tried to break into my site.

60.217.64.210 s China Unicom Shandong, level 10 risk, malware Spam Zero-Day
60.248.0.230 s Hinet Chunghwa Tel Taiwan, known for bots and infected zombie computers
183.167.228.134 s Chinanet Anhui, level 10 risk, malware Spam Zero-Day
218.21.43.238 s Dou shi-BAR Yin chuan Ningxia, level 10 risk, malware Spam Zero-Day

The last one, from Ningxia, looks surprisingly small as compared to the usually huge number of IP addresses for Chinanet or China Unicom, but they are part of Chinanet Ningxia, which is large.

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Generating htpasswords through SSH

If you are on Ubuntu and do not want to install htpasswd, SSH into your server

htpasswd -n id

You will be prompted, twice, for a password. The key will be generated on screen

-n: generate key on screen
id: chosen id
password: chosen pw
code will be generated, add this to password file

Notes:
password file not available from FTP
Brute Force Attacks
htpasswd

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Bell Fibe 50 Home Installation: Toronto, Canada

Bell Fibe 50, wired connection to the Home Hub 3000, gave me 52mbps download and 52mbps upload using the the Ookla speed test. Toronto, Canada

Two months ago Bell called me up and set up an install date for my Bell Fibe 50 installation, Bell fiber optic to my house. I have waited to do a review to ensure that the install was stable and reliable. In summary, Bell was correct in that their Bell Fibe 50 is much more reliable than their twisted pair copper wire, and a whole lot faster. We are getting speeds of 51mbps download as well as upload. This compares to our Bell Fibe 15/10, which was twisted pair copper wire to the Bell node (~1km away), and from there it was fiber optic, which gave us 15mbps dwonload and .7mbps, or 700bps upload.

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Triad Bot Attack Strategy: Login, http, root, then repeat

My site is getting attacked by an unusual method. They come every day, with different IP addresses, each IP address only doing 3 server requests each IP each day. These all add up to a lot of bandwidth. From 2017 Jan 17 to 2017 Jan 29 I have had 4,284 server requests. 1,341 IP addresses, as far as host and whois lookups can find, are involved.

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