Getting Your FTP Passwords Scraped

by admin on February 23, 2010

Over the weekend, my ftp client was scraped by a Chinese trojan for access to my web sites. This was a pretty good trick as I wasn't on the computer the whole weekend because of the Olympics. Now I had passwords stored on the family computer in the kitchen which wasn't the smartest thing to do but hey, who knew?

Sunday night I was on the phone with my business partner and he was all of a sudden, hey what's up, the website is down! So I get on the phone and check with the hosting provider and every web site I own (or have access to) is getting knocked out.

So yeah, that's when I learn that there are Chinese trojans that scrape your PC looking for ftp clients like pureftp, coreftp, etc and if you store your passwords on them, they scrape 'em.

Then, once they get a hold of your passwords, they ftp in your account and download the virus that gets triggered if you use php in your website (and pretty everybody on Linux runs php on their web servers).

All yesterday, I was writing up tickets for web host support, trying to get all my web sites restored from backups. The clients sites got up first, with this blog not getting restored until early evening. So now you know why I was down yesterday.

So how do people know the Trojan is from China? Well the servers that load the virus (you can track the IP addresses in Apache logs) originate from China. Maybe in a few years, they will get as sophisticated as the Russians, who first write Trojans to get  PCs (outside their native country) acting  as 'bots for them.

I do know that the Chinese trojans are really annoying a lot of guys trying to make some coin on the internet. I've see (and used) block lists of Chinese IPs addresses, which basically deny access to your website to any computer that originates from China. That's how much of a pain these Chinese scrapers have become.

In the meantime, I have been resetting passwords on all my websites and making sure to NOT store them anywhere on the computer. Fun, fun, fun.

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Olympic Torch Relay in the ‘Hood

by admin on February 11, 2010

Well, if you don't know it yet, the 2010 Winter Olympics start in Vancouver tomorrow, or today by the time you are reading this. And not only does the family of Prepress Pilgrim live in Vancouver, we live right in the middle of Vancouver, like Main and King Edward, which if you Google-map, you will see we are pretty well dead-center in the middle of metro Van.

So I yanked the kids out of school this afternoon so they could watch the Olympic torch relay. At first they were so excited they could hardly contain themselves, but then they realized that watching the torch relay meant leaving the house and not playing games on the Wii. So a bribe was in order....

children with umbrellas Olympic Torch Relay in the Hood

Umbrellas! Yes, here on the west coast, we bribe our kids with bright shiny new umbrellas. Then we take their pictures with a crappy $99 camera from Wal-Mart.

Anyhow, we make our way to Cambie Street near 19th Avenue, where the torch runner is to arrive at approximately three o'clock. We are to rendezvous with an elite battalion of youth ninjas, of which my oldest son aged 8, is a member. Of course they are disguised as:

cubs at olympic torch venue11 Olympic Torch Relay in the Hood

Wolf cubs ie junior members of the boy scout organization. You see, they have to be disguised otherwise they would freak out the neighbourhood. But really, they are ninjas. Honest.

more cubs at olympic torch relay1 Olympic Torch Relay in the Hood

In the above picture, there is a ninja in full camouflage garb. See if you can spot her.
Anyway, we stake out a spot on the sidewalk and patiently wait. Well, the boys wait patiently but my daughter, who is training to be a supermodel, decides to put on her best impersonation of Naomi Campbell and throws a hissy fit. (No pictures taken).
Okay, so finally they close the road and my middle son can no longer play chicken with incoming SUVs. But it is the torch? No...what is it? Oh my goodness, it's... it's...
olympic torch relay sponsor1 Olympic Torch Relay in the Hood

The Olympic torch relay procession sponsors!!!

Let me tell you, nothing symbolizes the games more to me than the sponsor wagon, complete with free swag. Except that I was holding on to a wailing 3 year old girl (not in picture), so I couldn't run forward and grab one of those groovy free Canada flags.

By the way, the first sponsor wagon was Coca-cola. Grab a coke and a smile. I'd like to teach the world to sing. Drink New Coke. Nobody paid me to write the last paragraph.

Now the second sponsor wagon was RBC, or Royal Bank of Canada.

more olympic torch sponsor1 Olympic Torch Relay in the Hood
Now I wouldn't say that RBC is smug or anything like that, but their new company motto is: "Yes, we are solvent because we didn't let crackheads or people on welfare take out mortgages like some *cough* American *cough* banks."
Anyhow, after the sponsors trucks moved on, they opened up the road to traffic and my middle son could start playing chicken with cars in the passenger lane again.
Finally, another procession, this time it's the real deal:
olympic torch relay security1 Olympic Torch Relay in the Hood
I get pumped, I tell my kids that this is once-in-a-lifetime-event. Not to be missed. And the wifey then tells me that Rachel needs to go pee. Now. Fortunately, there is a Starbucks on the other side of the street, and it's easy to jaywalk when the only cars on the road are police vehicles. Alright, we hustle over to the green mermaid, do our business, and hustle back just in time to get the snaps:

olympic torch1 Olympic Torch Relay in the Hood
And here's a closeup:

olympic torch2 Olympic Torch Relay in the Hood
Now we'll have two weeks of road closures and an inability to order sushi from our favorite restaurant because of the out-of-town curlers scaffing all the raw tuna (the curling rink is about 4 blocks from our house).
Wouldn't miss it for the world.

More posts to come.

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The Two Kodaks

February 8, 2010

So, a couple of weeks ago, I exchanged emails with a Kodak field that I knew from waaaaay back, like the 1990s. He was always field while I was always product development. Usually when we talked, that meant something had gone really wrong. Trust me, when things are running smoothly, the product guys and the [...]

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Another revolutionary product…

February 2, 2010

By the way, the niece and nephew are visiting and they brought the cat. It’s a very quiet, child-friendly cat, except that at about 3 a.m. it gets the urge to wage a battle to the death with the living room carpet. I guess what I am trying to say is that I didn’t get [...]

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Apple and iBooks and iPad

January 27, 2010

Insane traffic over at Tech Crunch which is covering the release of Apple’s tablet, the ipad. I’ve ripped off the latest news just in case you have trouble accessing the site:
Steve Jobs revealed the Apple iPad today, its much-awaited tablet computer (see our live notes). Jobs positions it as a third computing device between a [...]

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What Makes for a Good Print Blog?

January 24, 2010

M-bossed did a blog listing his top 10 print blogs. There are some familiar ones there, like Gordon’s Quality in Print, and the group bloggers at PrintCEO. There are also some  print blogs I’ve never read before, like the dieline, a blog for the packaging printers (the pictures are gorgeous, by the way).
There was also [...]

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How to Build a Digital Print Parts Catalogue

January 18, 2010

And now we will take a pause from attempting to write reasonably amusing blog posts to focus on the logistics of building and maintaining a web site. You may click away now.
Prepress Pilgrim was the first web site I ever built, apart from a blogger account (now closed) and some weird pay-for-hosting account that had [...]

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G’bye Adobe Print Service Provider Program

January 13, 2010

Thread over at Printplanet about Adobe killing the Print Service provider program.
Lots of people not too happy. Dov Isaacs, to his credit, is jumping in and speaking for Adobe. Good for him, too many vendors that sell to printers don’t actually, you know, communicate with printers on forums when tough decisions have to be [...]

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Kodak’s Hot New Picture Frame

January 11, 2010

I last wrote about digital picture frames here. Slowly but surely they are gaining market share, but of course one barrier is usability.  Like my Mom loves getting pictures of the gran- kids but is not one to set up an electronic picture frame so that its ready for action.  The market needs a digital [...]

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Google Creeps Me Out Sometimes

January 9, 2010

So seriously, how do they know that’s the name of my frickin’ blog? It’s obviously some sort of localization algo, as they are showing queries that are relevant to Canadians in prepress, but how did they know to show my blog as #1.  It’s not like I feature a lot of Canadian content either.
The server [...]

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