Category: Issues, Rumors & Scandal

Technorati uses a new system to count links and rank blogs

Brian Pinkerton just released a post letting us know that about a month ago, Technorati started using a new system to count links and rank blogs.

This new “secret” method of ranking blogs in their index is supposed to be both faster and more reliable than the old one.

While stale link counts are a thing of the past, the new system is not perfect. When things go awry the new system produces mistakes just as fast as it had been producing correct answers. As a consequence, link counts and rankings can fluctuate up and down alarmingly in a day. Or, the system gets slow and doesn’t produce answers at all. We’re on the path to fixing these problems and hope to have it completely solved soon. Nevertheless, when you see something amiss, please let us know!

Let’s wait a bit and see if we have any changes in the rankings or the Top100 blogs.

Update: Brian tells us how the new link and rank system works.

cPanel (all versions) Security Hole Exploited in Mass Hack

Using a new undiscovered security hole, hackers compromised all of HostGator‘s servers, and inserted trojans into their client’s websites :

HostGator says hackers compromised its servers using a previously unknown security hole in cPanel, the control panel software that is widely used by hosting providers. “I can tell you with all accuracy that this is definitely due to a cPanel exploit that provides root access and all cPanel servers are affected,” said HostGator system administrator Tim Greer. “This issue affects all versions of cPanel, from what I can tell, from years ago to the current releases, including Stable, Release, Current and Edge.”

Continue reading cPanel (all versions) Security Hole Exploited in Mass Hack

What a mass defacement can do to you, as a hoster – 650 hacked websites in one day

During yesterday / today (and it keeps going), a HUGE ATTACK HAPPENED with more than 630 websites (Romanian and foreign, but mostly Romanian) beeing hacked by a certain Arab Security Team (AST) (e-mail address : dr-hacker@hackermail.com) an arabian hacking faction, militating for “lebanon innocents”.

Continue reading What a mass defacement can do to you, as a hoster – 650 hacked websites in one day

Threadwatch down ?

Is Threadwatch really down ? or hacked ? or what ? In IE it shows a “page cannot be displayed” error, and in FF a blank page.

ThreadWatch Down IE ThreadWatch Down FF

This is the first time I ever saw it offline. Aaron ? :(

THe funny thing is that my own blog showed the same EXACT status when I tried to enter the administration back-end of WordPress. I fixed the problem by overwriting all the WordPress files from the standard kit.