Although I should be working on getting all the data loaded into the Canalplan Boats Database I’ve not been making a lot of progress on getting the new data and the old data mapped into a new structure which I wanted to use to make the data better.
As well as that it’s been a continual battle against the scum who just want to break servers and use them to post spam, send spam or compromise their websites.
Ecatel Limited seem to be a company who delight in hosting scammers and criminals. They had several machines in several different IP address blocks all hammering the xmlrpc.php file on this server. Doing some research into this shows that this problem has been going on for over 18 months and Ecatel do not seem to do anything about it. Emails to their abuse department went unreplied which seems to be pretty much par for the course. So their CIDRs have been firewalled.
The Shellshock attempts continue from various places and although some companies have replied quickly others simply haven’t.
You do wonder how much better the internet could be if people building websites and on-line systems didn’t have to devote significant resources to stopping scum from attempting to break things. All these stupid attempts against servers are also using up resources that should be being used to serve real data to real users.