It appears that the installation of Akismet into this blog a few days ago was just in time. Since then, Akismet has blocked 40-50 spam comments, all of which were links to a range of objectionable websites. So far Akismet's filtering has been a 100% success. However, so far, all comments posted since installation have been spam. Not a single legitimate comment has been posted.

This morning the first Silverstripe specific hacking attempt occurred. Three separate IP addresses from across the globe attempted to perform code-injection exploits on this website for about an hour. It is clearly targeting Silverstripe because the server logs show references to Silverstripe specific files, e.g.:

Over the last day, several comments were posted to this blog that contained links to websites with very dodgy URLs. Essentially, all the links were to dirty websites that peddle content that I do not wish to see, or be associated with. Over the last week I have simply logged on regularly, and deleted any comments that were Spam. However, this still leaves a window during which that unwanted trash is visible on this website. This morning's dose of dirty spam motivated me to take the time to install Akismet, a comment spam filtering service.

... then why would it work the second time, or the third, or the fourth, etc. Yesterday I discussed a TinyCMS exploit that someone attempted to use on this website, in order to steal passwords. Fortunately, this website does not use TinyCMS, so it failed. However, skimming through today's log demonstrates that this exploit is truly out in the wild. A single IP address has basically been hammering the server non-stop from 5:30 A.M. through to 8:30 A.M. this morning, with what are essentially the same two requests:

The last few days a deluge of Perl based code-injection hacking attempts have been made on this website. Most of them are more of the same old attacks that I have documented previously. However, one particularly insistent user-agent made an attempt to get the password file on the server. Have a look at the following two log entries:

It was inevitable that eventually someone would post spam as comments to this blog. Today, the first spam-bot that is designed to post comments arrived. The log entries are:

The announcement made last weekend regarding the RadeonHD for Amiga OS 4 driver project resulted in a spike in traffic to this website. This spike was triggered simply by mentioning this project on two of the online Amiga forums. Other websites quickly picked up on these links and posted their own links to the project page. As a result, the number of visitors over the next few days dwarfed the average visitors per day for the rest of the month (see the plot below). It has since dropped down, and it remains to be seen if traffic levels will drop all the way down to their original level, or remain slightly higher.

The first truly personal development project is finally online. Over half a year ago I installed a Radeon X1300 PCI graphics card into my Amiga-on, with the intention to develop an Amiga OS 4.x driver for such cards. Till now this project has been kept silent because I do not with to announce something that will never be finished. Today, the first major milestone was reached; the graphics card was programmed with a 1280x1024 true-colour screen mode and an image was displayed. 

This will probably be one of the last blog entries related to code injection hacking attempts on this website. A pattern has emerged, and, until some new form of attack occurs, there simply is no point in mentioning every slight variation. Yesterday three nearly identical hacking attempts occurred from three different addresses. These attacks appeared to try and mask what was being performed somewhat. As usual, the tell-tale sign is the addition of other website URLs in the URL:

Scanning through the web-server's log this morning, one entry caught my eye: