Information Security

finditnow.osa.pl Hack: Google Search Results Redirect To finditnow.osa.pl Instead Of Correct Site

Security23 Comments

Late last night I realized that the traffic for Question-Defense.com was way down for the day and thought it was related to some recent updates I had performed on the site. I spent probably an hour or so last night verifying that nothing was out of the ordinary with the site and wasn’t able to find any issues. Upon waking up this morning the traffic again was extremely low for this time of the day even on a Saturday so we started to investigate. One of the referrers that traffic had dramatically decreased for was Google so we went to Google and performed a search that we knew would return a link to Question-Defense.com. Sure enough upon clicking on the link to Google we hit the question-defense.com URL and then we were immediately redirected to finditnow.osa.pl. Below we describe the issue in more detail, provide specifics about how our site was hacked, and provide the information needed to locate and resolve the problem.

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Technology Insights

How to install DD-WRT Firmware on a Asus RT-N16 Wireless Router

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I recently ordered one of the newer Asus routers just to stay up on the wifi world and I decided on the RT-N16. I normally like open-wrt firmware however its still listed as a work in progress for this router. This left me with 2 options, Tomato firmware and DD-WRT firmware. For the first run I decided on DD-WRT. Below I will outline the relatively simply steps to get up and running with dd-wrt on the n16

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Technology Errors

Failed loading /usr/sbin/ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so: /usr/sbin/ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so: undefined symbol: zend_error_noreturn

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After upgrading PHP recently on a CentOS Linux server from PHP 5.2.X to PHP 5.3.X I ran into numerous minor issues. One of the issues was with a web application that requires the ionCube PHP Encoder libraries to function properly. After upgrading PHP I noticed some errors in the Apache error logs including the ionCube Apache module that was failing to load. Below I display the entire error from the Apache error_log file and how to easily resolve the issue by installing a single package via the Yum Package Manager.

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Technology Errors

Type: Warning (2) Description: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings

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I recently upgraded a CentOS Linux servers PHP from 5.2.X to 5.3.X and ran into a couple minor issues along the way. One of the issues was the fact that one of my applications was complaining about PHP’s date function by letting me know that it could not rely on the system’s timezone setting. Fixing this problem is extremely easy and can most likely be resolved by a quick edit to the servers php.ini file as described in detail below.

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Technology Insights

Htop Exclamation Mark Near Uptime In Output On Linux Server

Insights3 Comments

The other day while troubleshooting an issue on a server I noticed something I hadn’t ever noticed before which was an exclamation mark next to the uptime output from the htop command. After investigating and looking over the source I found that it is a bonus letting you know that your server has been up for a long time. Basically anything over 100 days of uptime will produce an exclamation mark next to the uptime reading. Below I show the sourcecode from the UptimeMeter.c file in the htop source as well as examples of how the htop uptime can vary depending on how long your server has actually been up.

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