So I was checking my firewall, because it sent me a message saying someone had tried to hack into my site. By trying to log in exactly one time with the username ‘oae’, after which they were blocked and went away quietly, probably to try that same username on a different site because they were just casual like that. But it was while I was wondering what significance ‘oae’ might have for someone that I noticed what had been going on in the permanent block list.
First, the hackers from Lviv, Ukraine have apparently tried to get in a whopping 10,336 times since I originally blocked them in August 2016. Their most recent attempt was June 2 of this year. If you haven’t already, do your site a favor and just block their whole host: *broadband.kyivstar.net
And then there are our friends from Panama, who have made the effort to repeat their failed SQL injection attack a total of 469 times since January. If you didn’t block them when I mocked them during the original go-round, you probably should.
Today we’re also going to give a nice shoutout of shame to the SEMrush bots, which are somewhat aggressively combing through my site as I type this. In fact, their Bot #18 just made the firewall throw up a warning, so I’m going to be showing them the blocklist. If you’d like to get in on the rude bot blocking as well, I’d suggest using hostname: *.bl.semrush.com
And one final non-shaming firewall shoutout to my poor confused reader in France: You couldn’t get to Island of the Snark because I had to take it down, because that story is part of the BOOK that’s coming out at the end of July. 😉