Last week I noticed yet another ongoing brute-force attack against our managed WordPress hosting. The botnet is very low key and each bot connects on average only once per day. Up until now, I’ve collected in the ballpark of 3100 unique bots.

I figured it was about time for this Gentoo powered blog to enjoy the security and performance enhancements provided by TLSv1.3. However, that meant leaving “Gentoo stable” behind and travel on a journey of discovery into the land of the unmasked and dangerous.

Earlier this week I noticed a minor brute-force attack against our managed WordPress hosting. The attack lasted for 72 hours and deployed around 2000 unique bots. The botnet attempted on average 100 logins per hour while rotating bots to avoid triggering our automatic defense systems.

I was unaware that Facebook recently had started to add a unique click identifier to all outbound links on facebook.com. Coincidentally, one of the security measures of this server is to disallow query strings as part of the URL. Thus, any visitors coming over from Facebook were suddenly blocked and banned on sight.

A while back I lost access to the email address with which I had subscribed to the slackware-security mailing list. This does not please Bob, so today I logged into my webmail account and sent along a new request to join slackware-security and slackware-announce. The response I got in return gave me a good laugh and a swift feel of nostalgia.

I’ve never really felt all that good about storing my passwords on the public cloud, but after we started using LastPass at work I somehow got lulled into adopting it for personal use as well.

So why is this release noteworthy? Well, I experienced an issue with the previous release (Tor 0.3.4.7) where I was unable to get sandboxing to work due to the following error:

The highly anticipated continuation of last year’s riveting tale of fear and loathing on the dark web. I hereby offer a full disclosure of attack patterns observed against my onion and my WordPress installation, respectively.

Gentoo developers recently marked mod_security-2.9.1 and modsecurity-crs 3.0.2 as stable on amd64, thus allowing me to move on from the dormant ModSecurity 2.7.7 release. Good thing I got this update on a Sunday though as it turned out to be more than a simple drop in replacement.

PHP 7.2 just went stable on amd64 providing me with an opportunity to finally migrate away from PHP 7.0. Unlike the PHP 7.1 releases, PHP 7.2 offers significant performance improvements.