For those of you paying attention, I am almost at my wit’s end. I have been sitting at my keyboard writing what could generously be described as “articles” on what it means to be an architect, and in a somewhat lesser capacity, pulling the curtain back on the process of working with an architect since January 10th, 2010. It’s hard to believe but this is the 817th article I’ve written since “Who Wants to be Relevant?” my very first article … you would have thought that I’d be better at this by now.
But I’ve just about had enough … 486,712 worth of enough.
This site, the one that I have painstakingly built and showered with blood, sweat, and tears, has been under almost constant attack for the past year. I couldn’t tell you why I have been singled out – maybe it’s karma – or maybe it’s just bad luck. Whatever it is, I am about to give up and throw in the towel. The image above is a screen capture of the IP addresses from just the past 7 days that have tried to brute force their way into my site. Even though this is a list of just 7,961 blocked attempts, this is only part of the story. I also know that in the last 5 days, I’ve had another twenty-four IP addresses blocked for attempting 486,712 times to log on to the administrative page on my site.
Let that soak in a moment. 486,712
That’s 68 times per minute over a 5-day period. Why would someone want to log on to my site, a site whose best days are arguably in the rearview mirror? Sure, back in 2012 “Life of an Architect” was considered one of the best architectural blogs you could find – at least according to some:
Even though we’re staring into the gaping maw of 2013, it feels like the early aughts on Life of an Architect. [ … ] Bob Borson treats his digital diary in the confessional and modest manner that the blog format originally intended. The Dallas-based architect’s discussion of materials, the occasional existential dilemma, and other day-to-day scenes should be relatable to most working professionals.
Architectural Record Dec’ 2012
As a result of these constant attacks, I spend an extraordinarily large amount of time trying to fix website issues – an area that I have extremely limited knowledge. I have tried just about everything you can think of, but whatever successes I experience are short-lived and the issues manifest themselves in a different manner with similar results. Slow loads, no loads, blacklisted url’s … the list goes on and on.
What I see on my end of things is that I can’t respond to emails sent to me with a “hotmail” extension because I’m blacklisted. I’m not even sure that I’m receiving all the emails that get sent to me. I’ve seen visitor traffic on some days drop by 80% because the site won’t load. Even now, if you look at the top of my website, the banner is missing. Remember? It used to look like this:
but now it won’t load even though everything on my site tells me that it’s there and it has loaded … but my eyes don’t lie. It isn’t there. **UPDATE – header banner back in place as of Tuesday, June 27th!!**At any rate, I just wanted to let you know what’s going on and try to explain why I haven’t been publishing as many articles. I’ve been spending my time trying to learn everything I can in order to get back to doing what I want – which is sharing the life of an Architect – whatever that means. I do not want to spend my time talking to IT Administrators about hosting issues, content delivery networks, and whether or not I have a correctly assigned SSL certificate in place. This is not where my interests lie and as a result, I think I might only have a few more really good attempts left in me to try and correct this problem.
The next steps for me probably include finding a new template, migrating my content over to this new template, then switching over to a new server host and saying a few prayers. In the meantime, if you come to the site and things don’t look quite right just know that I am working on it.
Keep your fingers crossed for me –
