Archive for September, 2007

Seeing a website being hacked in real time

Friday, September 28th, 2007

You always hear about these stuff, a website has been hacked and its landing page has been changed by the hacker. But, what are the chances you’ll get to see that, as it happens, on a large website.
It was 48 hours ago. I went to checkout weeworld.com, a cool avatars creators which recently released a nice new feature for theire avatars called weeRooms.

To my surprise this is the page that was loaded:

Weeworld hacked 1

After rechecking that I got the URL right, I opened the website in IE as well and got the valid weeworld website. This likely happened, and I’m only guessing here, cause their load-balancer served me with a different weeworld server, one that hasn’t been hacked yet. When I refreshed a minute later, this server gave me the hacker page as well. It gave the feeling that this is a hack in progress and the hacker is going through all of their servers and changing the landing pages (index.aspx).

IT try to fight back:

Weeworld hacked 2

Server is down:

Weeworld hacked 3

Website is down:

Weeworld hacked 4
It took another few minutes and the website was completely down (probably by weeworld IT). It took a few more hours and the weeworld website was up and running again. Congrats to the IT for getting a hold of this hack and fixing it in a short time which probably felt like eternity.

I guess it’s satisfactory for the hacker to hack a relatively large website like weeworld. But, what with these 1990′s styled hacker landing pages?! Don’t they want to update it to something more contemporary? Something more Web2.0′ish with gradients and reflections and a little bit of Ajax, or better yet write it all in Flex. A guy who can baffle the minds of full security crews can’t come out with an appropriate web page? The same way developers became design / usability aware interactive developers, I think we should have also usability aware hackers.

The hacker landing page also included two prank scripts that i don’t think even work since windows 98.

This VB script is supposed to open your CD drive. VS script?! What is the computability of VB script?!

[vb]Set oWMP = CreateObject(“WMPlayer.OCX.7″ )
Set colCDROMs = oWMP.cdromCollection

if colCDROMs.Count >= 1 then
For i = 0 to colCDROMs.Count – 1
colCDROMs.Item(i).Eject
Next ‘ cdrom
End If[/vb]

This Javascript is suppose to shake your browser:

[js]function shake(shakes, vibration) {
for (i = shakes; i > 0; i–) {
self.moveBy(i, vibration);
self.moveBy(-i, -vibration);
}
}

shake(’100′,’100′)[/js]

Both scripts look like they were created by some program.

I’m glad that weeworld.com is up and running again and probably in a more secure way, check them out they have some cool stuff.

Apparently iskorpitx is a famous Turkish hacker who’s been doing this for a long time, he even got a promo video in youtube. Is that a Web2.0 hacker or what?!

Call me now! Jajah new Flash widget

Monday, September 24th, 2007

We’ve just released the Jajah Buttons which enables you to receive calls from your website, blog, online community, email, etc’ directly to your phone and all that without revealing your phone number. Check it out, call me now.

The Jajah button let’s you determine when, where and to whom you are available for calls. It also give you a permanent short link that leads people straight to your phone. You can always reach me with this url – jajah.com/guy

The Flash widget is completely customizable in size, colors, supports multiple languages and have a unique look and feel. The widget was developed in Actionscript 2.0 mainly for compatibility reasons, it was intended to be released some time ago, before the Flash 9 Player reached 90%. Over that time it was overdeveloped with many features and a complete set of controls that were developed from scratch. Many of these features did not make it to the final (first) release, but, are ready to be put back in when the time is right, so stay tuned if you’re interested in this kind of stuff.

The Jajah Button graphics were designed by the uber talented crew at Ichiban.

Jajah widget colors

Call animation:

Jajah widget call animation

Developing Actionscript 2.0 controls is a tiring and unappreciated task. Show it to a non-flash developer and they’ll tell you – “thats nice but I have that in HTML also, I simply write an input tag…”, they simply can’t see the difference. This strengthen my feeling that some people, mainly developers, are color blind and can’t differentiate between a circle and a box ;) . If Microsoft is expecting these guys to do something appropriate with Silverlight, then they shouldn’t, cause it ain’t gonna happen.

Using the macromedia’s V2 components, as always, didn’t seem right. The Flash CS3 Actionscript 3.0 component set, although modest, looks like something that is more reasonable to inherit from. To complete your set, take a look at yahoo’s Flash components.

This is the code I used to embed the Jajah flash widget inside this post using the Kimily Flash Embed wordpress plugin. There are more parameters you can add to make its colors look more like your style, check the editor for that. The Jajah Buttons Editor also gives you the code snippet suitable for your needs.
[code] [/code]

Screenshots from the editor:

Customize colors and size

Editor - Customize colors

Set your availability

Editor - Availability 1

Countries you wanna get calls from

Editor - Availability countries

Callers blacklist

Editor - Availability blacklist

For more info go here…

Akismet has saved my blog from over 100,000 spam comments

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

Since I’ve installed Akismet last year it saved my blog from 100,425 spam comments. It seems to me like an insane amount of spam for an easy going blog like mine, and though I haven’t counted it, I guess only a few hundreds have managed to passed through its defenses. Over that year I kept on reading about other spam plugins and it doesn’t seems to me that there is a better solution yet for bloggers. If you run a wordpress blog or any other comments driven website then you should install it, it’s fast and easy.