Cyber-Attacked: Is It Worth It?

One of the duties of the day with the blog is to check for comments. I only do it into the day and so it can't usually facilitate fast and furious conversation. We've all heard about Google in China, its rotten self-censorship and now its cyber attacks. It seems clear now that this blog is under a form of cyber attack, as indeed is my website (and has been for some time).

For some reason, one blog entry receives persistent comment in non-standard and unreadable comments, and after an entry I'll check for comments and find yet again that the one entry has had someone or some thing send unreadable comments. It's no big deal just to tick it and press reject, and do so being careful to keep any legitimate comments. So whoever or whatever is doing this is just wasting their time and being a moderate nuisance.

My website keeps a response page that builds in a kind of feedback form. To fill this in needs a form of effort, and does not come with any prospect on submitting other than being seen by me. Now, I check emails two ways. I check for titles and names on the server, at which point I wipe out most without even looking at them. It is a much more effective way of handling spam than relying on a slow junk mail system after downloading all emails. Now I cannot tell a good website feedback from a bad one that way, but a double click produces a safe text version of an email download, and then the merest glimpse can show whether it is a real feedback or advertising. I must admit, it does baffle me that someone goes to the effort to put in an advert for something I can tell instantly is a form of spam and therefore about which I read no further. I have no idea what they are selling, or otherwise trying to get me to download and wreck my machine, but after that glimpse the message is destroyed back on the server, the text view having been safe.

Both of these are mild irritants, and utterly futile. It must be more effort for them - presumably the attacks are far wider than just my blog and website - that these are worth. In my case nothing is read beyond the least needed for identification, and nothing of such gets through.