Fail sneakers, holiday party, hacked, back
Yesterday I planned to run on the treadmill at the gym. I was wearing my new Nike running sneakers for the second time. I wore the same sneakers when I failed at my max pace mile last week.
I planned to run at least three miles at a more mundane 7 mph pace. It didn’t take long until I felt like I was struggling once again. I just felt uncomfortable while running, more tired than I should be. I stopped after only a mile. I walked 1/4 and then tried starting up again. I immediately started feeling some pain in both knees as I tried to resume a running pace. I immediately slowed the belt back down to walking pace and finished my cardio session in that manner.
I have to believe it was all shoe related. It annoys me that I spent the money for a pair of running sneakers that I can’t run in. I will probably just use them as my normal gym sneakers. For now I will keep using my old NB 1060’s to run in and then get a pair of 1064’s after the holidays.
Last night was the holiday party for the running club. The club always opts to have the party on a weeknight which I wish wasn’t the case. It would work out much better on a Friday or Saturday night. This year the club decided to really go upscale with the accommodations, having the get together at the local Hilton.
Both Ali and I had duties to perform at the party. Ali was working the sign in desk and I was in charge of making sure the AV equipment was working for a small video that was going to be shown during dinner. The schedule was an hour and a half cocktail hour followed by a sit down dinner.
Even though we were paying a ton for the accommodations compared to years past, that didn’t equate to getting ANY break on alcohol. It was a cash bar. I bet I spent close to $50 by the time the night was over on drinks. I much preferred when club members were able to bring their own alcohol and share.
All the women were primped to the max, including Ali, who looked great. It’s hard to convince her to dress up just for me for some reason.
The dinner portion of the evening was fine. The food was good and the service was decent. The video that I set up to play was well received by the crowd. It was about a young guy that was very overweight who found running. It totally transformed his life. If you would like to see it click here.
The rest of the evening went fine. The main speaker was a local ultra runner who has just an incredible resume of accomplishments. He told us stories about his various experiences over the years. It was all pretty amazing but the most incredible of all was his running 450 miles+ in the span of 6 days.
One of the supposed reasons this venue was going to be worth the extra money was it was big and had a dance floor to allow people to dance. Well as soon as the meal was over and the speeches were done 80% of the people were out the door within 10 minutes. Even though we paid to have the space until 11pm almost everybody was out of there by 10:15. It is a by product of having the party on a weeknight. I am pretty sure next year the holiday party will be handled a bit differently. Sure it was nice at the Hilton but the lush accomodations didn’t really add all that much to the event for me. It’s much more about the people that show up.
So when I got home I had to do a few club related things in the timing system and the website even though it was already after 11pm. When I was editing one of the web pages I noticed the scroll bar on the side looked unusually small. A small scroll bar means a long list of things to scroll. Well I scroll down and see a long list of bullshit links injected into the end of the page. F me, I have been hacked, again.
So I did some snooping around to see how wide spread the problem was. Luckily the affected files seemed to be limited to the root directory of two domains. I was pissed off. I had been dealing with a series of problems with my web host, IX Webhosting for the past few weeks. I have had almost daily problems with access to my content timing out or being extremely slow. Then on Tuesday they had a hardware problem that totally knocked my sites offline for 6-7 hours. To have my content hacked was just the cherry on top.
So I call in and talk to a tech. I explained the frustration of getting hacked after dealing with slow performance and outages already. He looked at my content and saw the hacked files. He said that he would take care of cleaning them as well as scanning my content for a malicious script that would have allowed the code injection. He said he would work on it overnight and send me an update in the morning. Ok great, good night.
So this morning I get the update. He found that a script had been uploaded under my ftp account and that script was what was responsible for the code injection. He said my ftp password had been compromised and said I probably have a keylogger on my system.
That line really set me off. When IX had rampant hacking going on with their shared servers a year or two back they constantly pointed the finger back at their customers, saying the compromise was on our end, not theirs. Later it was revealed the majority of these problems actually were the result of poor security on their end.
Getting that finger shoved back in my face really annoyed me. I know all about safe surfing and use multiple layers of protection to prevent getting something like a keylogger. Even so, I ran Spybot on my system in safe mode on both my home and work pc to verify I had no gremlins in there, which I didn’t. It would be hard to imagine that a brute force attack would have worked, my ftp password was pretty strong.
The message from the tech continued, saying their script was unable to remove the bad line of code from the nearly 200 affected files. He said I would have to manually download each file and remove the line myself. Well I told him this wasn’t what we talked about on the phone but I would take it up with my normal support hero, Tom, who always has been good to me.
So I started the arduous clean up process. After I manually cleaned the third or fourth file I remembered that my buddy Charlie wrote a program a couple years ago that helped me recover from a similar hack. Basically you download the affected hacked files into a directory, tell the program what the start and end of the bad code looks like and it goes in there and rips it out in a few seconds.
I let the program run and it worked beautifully, cleaning a couple hundred files in a few seconds instead of the few hours it would have taken me otherwise. If you happened to stumble across this blog entry because you are looking for hack fixing info, based on the tags, I can hook you up with this hack fixer. Just email me at [email protected]. Thanks Charlie.
So anyway my files are cleaned up, my ftp password has been changed and we added additional restrictions on my ftp account that will only allow ME to access it based on ip address restrictions. How the hack went down exactly is still a mystery.
Howard announced this morning that he finally renewed for another 5 years with Sirius. I have mixed feelings about this. Sure I am happy I can continue listening to him without having to change a thing for the next 5 years. But there was also a part of me that was looking forward to telling Sirius to get bent and take their bullshit music royalty and online listening surcharges with them. Hell I prepared for Stern leaving by converting my one subscription to monthly so I could get out quickly.
There are some other good things about the new agreement, the biggest being they are NOW going to be streaming Stern on their official smartphone apps, a hole that angered many (including me) up until this point. Howard also mentioned something about more scheduling “flexibility” which can only mean more freaking vacation for a guy that already has a third of the year off. Oh well, it’s better than no Howard at all.
Tonight not only do I have to prep for Randall’s arrival on Friday, I also have to bake cookies for the work xmas party. All I want to do is play some Cataclysm damn it…. At least I got some xmas shopping done yesterday online.