SOUTH BRONX SCHOOL: BREAKING NEWS!!!! THIS BLOG IS UNDER ATTACK!!!

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

BREAKING NEWS!!!! THIS BLOG IS UNDER ATTACK!!!

Last night after I wrote my piece about the flamingos and Kindergarten I decided to check out Stat Counter to see how many hits, visits, pages views, etc... there have been to my blog. It had been a while and was just curious.

My eyes almost burst out of my eyes when I saw the total. Now mind you, this was about 10:30 PM or so. There were about 4,000 pages views as of that time, about 450 visits. I was surprised. I have seen big numbers but never like this and usually the numbers spike when I am linked or I write something that hits home, but usually linked.

I tried to ascertain who linked me. No one did. But I did come across something else. Only the last five visitors appeared on the page, and one of them had the near maximum views allowed, about 495. Upon further investigation the name if the ISP (Internet Service Provider) is Lightower Fiber Networks with the IP (Internet Protocol address) of 107.181.16.10 out of New York. (Click to enlarge)

I know of Lightower. Lightower does business with the DOE and the city (Item #13). So what is the deal?

At first I kind of figured that someone is burning the midnight oil at Tweed printing out my entire blog. Check this out, this is just in the last 2 minutes or so (Click to enlarge);


This is what it was like last night at 10:30 and when I checked at 3 AM. It could not be someone printing at 3 AM. Even if someone were to be printing the blog at that hour, or any hour, that person would not be going from each post to each post. There are much simpler ways to do it. I was starting to think it was a DNS or DOS attack or some kind of malevolent hijinks (If anyone wishes to share their idea please do!).

So this morning around 9 AM I contact Lightower tech support and open up a ticket. I was told they would look into it.

I called back around noon and found out where this "attack" was emanating from. I was told the "City of New York Law Department," or as we know it, the Corp Counsel. Oh, and I was told they are investigating it and sent an email to the IT person and have yet to hear back. And they kept on trying and still heard diddly(Click to enlarge):

So something weird is going on. I am still in touch with Lightower and was told if this problem is persisting for another 24 hours that that IP address will be disabled. 

What I am wondering, is if this is an attack, does this rise to the level of criminal conduct? And also, who is behind this? 

At least it is being "looked into" as of now and wonder where this will lead. But something does stink.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't get your hopes high, you are not that important...

1) "Attack" is coming from one IP? Please, that's not an attack. Use FW, block that IP from accessing, but then you couldn't brag about being attacked

2) Opening new page every 5-20 seconds? That's not an attack. Opening 10K per second is. And your site is still up, so you are not really under attack. It could be that someone is running some malware that's browsing through your blog, or has a book fallen on F5 (refresh) button and keeps reloading pages on your blog

3) I am not going to comment anything on your blogs about education system. I do not understand it, I don't care about it and I am not competent to write about it. You may be right or wrong, do whatever makes you happy. I am somewhat competent to talk about security and attack, and you are not under it, so please do not spread lies on your blog. Block that IP if you don't want DoL to read your posts and move on. This is pitiful.

Enjoy life and be happy.

Anonymous said...

Anon @ 1:18 could you a person who lives on Staten Island that has loads of talent on spy ware and cracking emails and addresses.... to bad it is not you! Get a life! Go back to campaigning!

Anonymous said...

Anon @ 3:37pm

I think teach is right, education in this country is going down the drain... I didn't saw illiterate post like this in a while, and I am from eastern Europe...

Either way, guy is right, this is not the attack, just a guy craving for attention...

Pete Zucker said...

At 3:37 PM. Yeah, I think you might be right. For someone that "doesn't understand education" then why visit this blog?

Anonymous said...

I follow up on most of dos and DNS attack hashtags, I actually thought you are a school that has security issues, didn't know it was a blog.

As I said before, do whatever makes you happy, write about all educational issues you think deserve your attention and public awareness, but don't lie about being attacked... I am not denying that someone is browsing your blog, maybe collecting all info about it, etc. but you are not under any kind of DNS or DOS attacks...