St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

The Church of Scientology, whom has their worldwide headquarters near St Petersburg Florida, in Clearwater Florida, has has their official web site hacked. On Jan 19th a group of hackers, naming themselves “Anonymous” knocked the Church’s Web site offline with a distributed denial-of-service attack.
A “Distributed Denial of Service” (DDOS), attack is one of the most common types of attacks against well guarded web sites, servers and computer systems. When it’s an attack against a web site, it involves having millions of computers request a web page over ad over again. So many of these requests come in that the machine that hosts this file cannot keep up with these requests and does nothing. It’s hard to block because of the distributed part, which means it not several computers in one location but computers from all over the world.
How do they get people from all over the world to sit in front of their computers and request pages from the same web site over and over again? They don’t! That where spyware, viruses and trojans come into play. Software containing these forms of malware are installed on millions of computers all around the world when their users install them unknowingly by opening the wrong e-mail attachment, visiting the wrong web site or installing software that has been knowingly (or unknowingly) infected with these programs. This malware then gives the infected computer to start requesting a certian web page over and over again starting on a certain date (usually).
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The very first time I bought a domain name (in 1995) I knew this would happen eventually. Domain name registrar, Network Solutions LLC, is now locking domain names after people type them in their webform to see if they are available.

Here’s how their scam works:

• someone visits a site in their network of affiliates or their main site looking for a domain name.
• You type the domain name in their form to see if it’s available for purchase.
• If it’s available they show you the price and you realize (after you fill in all kinds of info on several pages), it costs more than a domain name should so you leave their site and go to or somewhere else.
• Network Solutions LLC “locks” that domain name making it unavailable for purchase through anyone else but them and also triples the price for the domain name.

Network solutions LLC is trying to say this is a public service. That’s like Dick Cheney trying to say we went to Iraq to fight terrorism (hint - their was no terrorism in Iraq before we came). This servers the public in no way and in fact just lines Network Solutions pockets by guaranteeing you buy from them and at 3 times the already overpriced price.

The Federal governments General Services Administration tried to shut down all of the state government pf California’s web sites after a CA county’s (Marin county) web site was hacked and reportedly was redirecting people to a porn web site. The Federal government says they feel they are responsible for every web site that ends in .gov Not just the domain nmaes that end in .gov but the websites content as well evidently.

There are 2 scary elements to this:

1. The feds were unable to take down all sites located at domans that end in .ca.gov like it wanted it too.
2. They were so inept that they felt that this was the way to deal with this problem instead of just taking down the one site.

For those of you reading this that own web sites but don’t manage themselves. Don’t worry, this is a much easier thing to fix that the government made it look. Prevention is obviously crucial (another area the feds are lacking in, obviously), but if the the unthinkable happens in can fixed in less than 10 minutes.

We just finished the Boat-Lift-USA.com site!

Check it out here:

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