I received a report via e-mail. 404 errors.<\/p>\n
A lot<\/i> of 404 errors.<\/p>\n
What’s a 404 error? Chances are you’ve seen one. You may not realize what it is, though. What a 404 error means is that the page you’re looking for can’t be found. Doesn’t exist. It’s that simple.<\/p>\n
Or, it could be that a file is missing. I thought I’d caught all of those in my stylesheet, for instance, but it did<\/i> call for a graphics file that didn’t exist. But I’d made a change to the stylesheet over the weekend, but then rolled it back. Maybe I’d messed something up.<\/p>\n
At least, that’s what I thought.<\/p>\n
But… I couldn’t understand why I’d suddenly have so many<\/i> 404 errors. And that meant pulling the server log — which no one in their right mind ever wants to do — and dig through it by hand.<\/p>\n
I found my answer.<\/p>\n
It was a spammer.<\/p>\n
Specifically, there was a spammer who was trying to hijack my server. He was hoping I had an unsecured Perl e-mail application running.<\/p>\n
To give you an idea of how stupid the spammer was, he tried four different directories. None of which exist on my server.<\/p>\n
And he ran hundreds<\/i> of queries, attempting to access Perl scripts that didn’t exist.<\/p>\n
Of course<\/i> he got 404 errors.<\/p>\n
And you can tell it’s automated — a real person would have realized, quite quickly, that there was nothing<\/i> along the lines of what he was looking for.<\/p>\n
Just stupid, when you come right down to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I received a report via e-mail. 404 errors. A lot of 404 errors. What’s a 404 error? Chances are you’ve seen one. You may not realize what it is, though. What a 404 error means is that the page you’re looking for can’t be found. Doesn’t exist. It’s that simple. Or, it could be thatContinue reading “On Stupid Spammer Morons”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4095],"tags":[339,351,494],"class_list":["post-1533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wordpress","tag-computers","tag-meta","tag-spam","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}