Strange goings on on the web today

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Hi all,

I don't know what's going on on the web today, but my site has been scraped twice (one full and one partial) by a couple of different addresses listed as belonging to two companies which have some kind of connection, but more worrying is a persistent effort from another IP address to try and log in to my blog and/or exploit a whole bunch of security issues.

If you've got a WordPress blog, I strongly (I can't type it with enough emphasis) suggest you (a) upgrade it to the latest version, (b) download the excellent plugin WP Security Scan plugin from here, install it and follow the instructions and (c) if you have full control over your server and it's running a firewall, sort out any dodgey IP addresses and block them (and/or the netblocks they originate from). If you want to know more about traffic levels and you're running WordPress, I use Wassup and StatPress Reloaded. They seem to be pretty good indicators of activity although they don't always get the IP address right... I'm guessing because the IP may be being spoofed in headers somewhere along the line.

Anyhow... just thought I'd mention it as it is a really strange occurence, in particular the prolonged attempt at logging in.

[noeska]

There are just to many script kiddies in the wild :-(
Even on server level whole children names book go by in alphabetical order.
So you better have a strong password consisting of upper and lowercase some number and non alpabetic characters and as loooong as possible.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Absolutely :-)

One of the things the security plugin recommends as well, is to use .htaccess to password protect the WordPress admin directory using Apache authentication as well as the admin login, so they can't even run the PHP scripts without knowing another password.