Jonno wrote me,
>> where are you, o Violet Blue?
>> i miss you for my love is true.
It’s good to be back. On sunday afternoon, right when I was wrapping up the podcast I did with Boing Boing (!), I noticed something weird happening in my inbox — and it was like a cascading black waterfall of spam down my screen. I realized I was under attack, or something. Then a minute later, I got an account auto-shutdown notice from my (now former) host. A quick call to a service number got a really rude guy who insisted *I was the spammer* and wouldn’t turn my account back on. Tiny Nibbles had been taken offline, and a quick check revealed that I was locked out of *all files* in my account. I couldn’t even get in, and my last backup was partial. It felt like a plastic bag had been pulled over my head.
The full story is after the jump — but I wouldn’t be back online if it wasn’t for my friend Scott Beale (who talked me off a ledge) and Laughing Squid (my new host with the most); Squishy, the beauty who spent a full day lovingly sweetly tenderly moving the *past 5 years of my life* to the new server (and talking me through the darkness, which finally ebbed today); and Jonathan Moore who provided hours of info and insight into what most likely happened during the attack (and took in a wayward panicked girl just before midnight on sunday with a Mac Mini stuffed in her motorcycle bag).
* * * * * * *
I haven’t been responding to emails or calls for a few days, as I’ve been in a strange sort of hell. Besides birthday depression, frustration with Teh Chronic (new nickname as of right now), stuff/drama with boys and all the usual life crap, having the one thing that keeps me connected to myself taken away has been intense. It’s a good lesson; now I can’t be compromised like that again, and I’m even stronger. Go figure.
When the emails started pouring in sunday afternoon I knew something bad was happening; but when I got the shutdown notice I was confused. After some horrifying Kafka-esque communication with Cedant making me have to wait until monday to even talk to someone about getting into my account, then a hysterical call to the only friend I thought might be able to answer my questions — Scott — I assesed the steps I needed to take to get away fron Cedant and make sure this never happens again. Scott explained to me that the reason I was with Cedant, their promise of unlimited bandwidth, was a lie. He commented that closing a customer’s account and taking it offline as reponse to a spam attack is the sign of a really, really bad web host — and I understood immediately that mine (Cedant) was one of the worst. Right then I realized I needed to be on Laughing Squid, where I should have been all along. I mean, as my friend Dave Calkins put it, ‘when a Squid sever goes down, there has been a disturbance in The Force.’
Hours later I found myself still in a state of panic; what if I lost my recent blog archives, which weren’t backed up? And what great timing, the Boing Boing podcast was set to go up tomorrow, and a visit to Tiny Nibbles just timed out… My sex ed files were all going to be okay and my podcast, and videos, but maybe not my blog. I was instantly coming to a lot of realizations about how much my center of personal gravity revolves around blogging — writing and self-publishing. I *need* to write, every day. My immediate relationship with readers — you — is everything to me. And having no family and a *very* unbelivably fucked up past, my blog has become my record of my history; being able to share my history — to see it tangibly — makes me feel like I exist and *matter* all by myself, even though I’m convinced the the universe doesn’t give a fuck about me. Strange, that. It was late and I was alone (just like on my birthday) — off kilter and in need of more information, a nonjudgemental place to weep openly about blog panic, and cuddles, I contacted fellow SRL member and all-around brilliant hottie Jonathan who said, come over, we’ll look at stuff and see what we can figure out. I was all like, but it’s here on my home computer. His response was, um, and your Mac Mini is so non-portable….?
Into the motorcycle bag it went and I raced to his house in a nearbly neighborhood, tucked in a San Francisco nest of Victorians and fog. Looking at what info I had, we concluded that it was a fairly simple, though intense, ‘from’ field spam batch/attack. (This is my translation of what he explained to me; also, I might learn more in the next few days.) It could have been malicious, or just part of how big spammers roll; my domain might have been a random selection, or Joe Bob in the trailer making his everyday living off spam and seeing my heathen commie faggot column in the Teh Chronic, and giving me a little xtra attention in his regular nefarious rounds.
But the proper response from my host should have been to shut down my mailboxes, not take me out. The thing is, I don’t use those mailboxes for anything, they’re not even set up — and Cedant should have been able to see that. I have never sent a single email from Tiny Nibbles. On monday, I finally convinced them to reopen my account so I could get my files and blog — pathetically, they still didn’t understand what happened; hilariously they made me ‘agree’ to remove my blog (cust service guy said happened because of my comments or forms — I’ve never had either) and then they would reopen my account so I could grab my files. I was all like, omigawd, totally ::giggle:: (Fuckers.) Yeah, I’ll remove it — over to Laughing Squid. As if I didn’t already love Laughing Squid enough… now I proudly fly a ‘powered by’ link on my site. Yay!
Incidentally, if you talk with me and I giggle and say blonde valley girl things like ‘like’ and ‘omigawd’ — one of two things might be happening. I’m either a) drunk and happy and silly and having a great time and you are part of it; or, b) I am silently reading the Necronomicon backwards in my head so the forces of darkness will swallow your soul at the next available moment.
Now, back to “normal”.
Comments on this entry are closed.