It’s been a little while since I wrote one of these and once again I want to talk about security.
If you have a WordPress site than the hackers want in. They are interested in co-opting your site for their own interests. Whether it is to run their own programs or redirect you to their own sites. The latest trick is to run cryptocurrency mining scripts on your site. Those can be some of the more benign uses. By using your site they take advantage of your online reputation. You don’t want to have your site blacklisted or ruin your search engine ranking.
I get alerts for this site on attempted logins. One of the things I made sure to do and is highly recommended is to not use “admin” as your user name for your site. However I still get attempts to login and a lot of those come from those meddling Russians. We have our own home grown hackers but I thought it was interesting enough to list the ones outside the United States.
So far I have had attempted logins from:
- Montpon-Menesterol, France
- Paris, France
- Naples, Italy
- Karagandy, Kazakhstan
- Lima, Peru
- Seoul, Republic of Korea
- Moscow, Russia
- Novoural’sk, Russia
- Perm, Russia
- Reutov, Russia
- St Petersburg, Russia
- Tolyatti, Russia
- Tula, Russia
- Ufa, Russia
- Ulan-Ude, Russia
- Yekaterinburg, Russia
- Barcelona, Spain
- Istanbul, Turkey
- Kiev, Ukraine
- Lviv, Ukraine
- Vinnytsia, Ukraine
- Steyning, United Kingdom
- Hanoi, Vietnam
As you can see the bad actors come from countries that are enemies and allies of the United States. That is why it is important to run security software and keep those plugins up to date.
If you want to take a closer look at where some of these places are you can view the map here. It was made using Google Maps.
Update:
Bill Hess at PixelPrivacy.com has a post about ransomware. If you are following the news, the City of Atlanta is currently a victim of a ransomware attack.