Extortion

I received an ominous comment on my blog today. The commentor claimed to have hacked my blog and harvested all of its databases – blogs, like online stores and other web sites, are database-driven. That is, every blog post is recorded as a database entry so that it can be served up to a site visitor on demand. Of course, there are a variety of database tables that record such things as blog images, the email addresses of visitors who post comments in response to my posts (that’s you: Susan, Cornelio, Sharon and a few others), and a few other site details that are of little interest to hackers.

Since my blog is intended as a “pull-only” site, a site that you must activate through a FB link to see a new post, you should never get a notice from my blog (a push) unless you leave a comment and I respond to you. If you just visit and read a new post and either do not comment or you comment in FB rather than in the blog itself, you will have left no trace of yourself here.

Today’s hacker claimed to have downloaded all of the personal information of my employees (I have none) and customers (I have none). This individual left a demand for $3,000 in bitcoin to repair the damage (s)he caused and to secure whatever security vulnerabilities (s)he had exploited to launch this ransomware attack.

I read blog community support threads today that show that this kind of fucking bullshit (the information science term of art for online extortion) has been going on for years. Sigh.

I have 72 hours to meet the extortionist’s demands. I say, fuck him or her and the horse they road in on. At worst, they will corrupt my site, and I will have to take it down – once again rendering me a FB-serf and putting your email address and mine on the dark web where people can use our addresses to phish us. I already get that crap anyway. Should that happen to the few of you have left your email addresses in order to leave an on-site comment, I apologize.

Sometimes I think that if there are data gods, they should smite people who engage in cyber extortion with frequently recurring, treatment-refractory Herpes simplex 2. Hijos de Puta.