Morning Phishing

One morning last week, I got up for work, poured my coffee and sat down to read email while I drank it. There was an email in spam that appeared to be from my website host. Gmail is usually really good about categorizing email, but they're not perfect.

I studied what I could see of the preview and it looked legit. I opened it. There was my full name and it was actually sent to the account I used to signup with my host. Most of the spammy stuff goes to my author account which I don't use on websites to avoid phishing attempts. I read through the email--the spelling and grammar was correct. The phone numbers and logo were correct. The from email address had my host's name.com.

The message concerned me. I'd added far too many directories, and if I didn't go to my account and combine them, I would be shut down. They suggested I go to my control panel or click on a handily included link. One reason I was so concerned? My former blog was hacked multiple times and I was concerned that someone had actually hacked into my website itself. That's the only way all those directories could be there because I hadn't added anything.

I paged through my files, but it didn't look as if anything had been added and I didn't see hundreds of directories. Puzzled, I was trying to figure out how to contact my web host and ask for help when I said, let me check out that email again. This time I clicked the link as a test. The page looked like my web host, but the address in the bar above was some site in Russia. It had a .ru extension.

Phished!

Normally I don't fall for this and I was lucky that my innate caution and natural suspicion had me paying attention. At that time of the morning, without coffee and short on sleep, it would have been too easy to just click through without thinking about it.

I forwarded the email to the abuse department of my web host. The lesson, though, is to be careful out there. The phishers are getting better.

The First Time I've Kickstarted

I've been over to visit Kickstarter a few times, mostly when other writers tweeted about projects for books or magazine issues. I've thought about investing, but never felt compelled. Until recently.

I backed The Stupendous Splendiferous ButterUp.

A group of Australian guys invented a knife that will actually spread butter without ripping up your bread--if the video is accurate. I'm making an effort to get back to more natural foods, but I've hesitated on butter because it's such a PITA to spread.

Since their goal of $38,000 Australian Dollars was surpassed by nearly 10x, it appears that I'm not the only one who hates spreading butter.

My Stupendous Splendiferous ButterUp is supposed to arrive in December. I'll try to remember to write a review after I've had a chance to use it.

Spam Attack

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed a huge increase in spam the past few weeks? Even accounts that I never had spam on before are suddenly getting two or three or four spam emails a day. My writing account? Forget about it. Spam is almost out of control.

It made me curious enough to do an internet search and after some browsing, I found an article with graphs showing that spam is at the highest level it's been at since October 2010. This article is from May 2014, so I guess I'm lucky that it took until July for the spam increase to catch up to me. Even so...sigh.

I've also gotten a good look at what kind of attacks have been directed at my website.

Those of you who've been reading my blog for a while might have noticed that I switched back to Blogger. I used to have a WordPress blog attached right to my website, but after it was hacked four or five times, I decided that was enough. I'm very computer savvy, but nothing I tried protected my blog.

I also switched to a new web host around the same time. Not because of the hacking, but because my old host had raised their prices dramatically. My new web host has different programs to look at stats and I was suddenly able to see what kind of assault my site took every month. And by far the vast majority of the attacks were aimed at finding WordPress or one of it's vulnerable plug-ins.

Yikes!

It really makes me glad I ditched WordPress even though I loved the flexibility and features it offered. I'm just sorry that some people out there have to ruin the web experience with spam and hacking attacks.

Site Organization Issues

On Tuesday, I posted about the release of my Jarved Nine series on audio. It's hugely exciting for me, but it's also led to a logistical issue on my website. How do I list ebooks, paper books, and audio books in a way that's uncluttered and easy for readers?

I went through this the first time with ebooks and paper. With that problem, I decided to list paper because sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble include links to the electronic versions. Now, as my paper copies have gone out of print, but the ebooks remain active, I've swapped out the links to the electronic versions. But now how do I handle it? I've tried to check out other authors' sites, but haven't found any method that I really like yet.

While I continue to ponder this, I've created a new page on my site and created a link on my books page to the audio books. They're linked to Audible who has all the books available, but that's something else I have to think about-linking to multiple audio book sellers.

It seems to me, there must be some way to organize my website that's clean and easy, but I haven't figured it out yet.