kahunaburger

This morning I received another “EBay Account Verification” scam message. And again, “yernadop” was behind this one (see my first post on this subject: here). This time he used http://infinitymicrocomponents.com/ to anchor the verification pages. Within 2 minutes after opening the page, I had sent a notification to spoof@ebay.com where one is supposed to report those kind of scam messages. About 2 minutes later I called the owner of the web site (who’s phone number was conveniently posted on the “Contact Us” page). Some woman answered and confirmed that I had indeed reached “Infinity Micro Components”, however she did not have a clue what I was talking about when I told her that her web server was hijacked and being abused. After 5 minutes of trying to explain it to her, I decided to send them email and strongly suggest to shutdown the web server or remove the pages in question.

A few minutes after hanging up the phone, I stumbled over a WS_FTP.LOG file in a directory that was used by the scammer. Interestingly enough it shows activity over the whole year and where the scammer placed false “Account Verification” pages (www.luckymv.com, www.trackitsolutions.com, www.planetamultimedia.com, etc.) - the list goes on and on. Some of them are still active.
I thought that this would be valuable information for ebay, however when I sent it to the same spoof@ebay.com address, I received a notification that my message was not received by ebay, because it did not happen to be a “forwarded message”.

Bummer! Here I sit with evidence of other spoof places and gullible people are getting ripped off and ebay does not offer a way for me to report this? Sad … somebody at ebay, please, wake up and provide a way where this information can be submitted. If you’re interested, that is …

PS: It’s also good to see that the “Account Verification” page on Infinity Micro Components has been shut down earlier today …

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A few weeks ago the Jeep Cherokee went to the shop for it’s regular maintenance. Only then we realized that the second Jeep (Wrangler; convertible; soft-top; very bouncy; very loud; very cold) may not be the perfect environment for a little baby. It also turned out that the baby seat would not fit properly on the rear seats and that Candice felt in general “unsafe” having to take Pia in the Wrangler.
I guess this was the beginning of the end for the little Jeep and on Sunday it got axed finally. The Wrangler was replaced by a shiny new Volvo XC70. According to the sales person’s pitch we are beginning to believe that this is the safest environment for the baby - in fact we think we should have her “live” in there …

A last look at the old car and a first look at the new one. Bye, bye Wrangler … we really loved you.

Wrangler vs. XC70

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This Saturday I converted one of my old PCs into the new server for www.kahunaburger.com. If you’re a regular visitor and have not noticed any changed behaviour of the site, then I guess I was successful. The Sun Ultra 1 was retired and replaced by a 700 MHz Pentium III running FreeBSD.

It is incredible how easy FreeBSD 5.x is when it comes to installation and configuration - it’s quite a lot better than the 3.x and 4.x versions I used in the past. I also seem to see quite a performance improvement after the switch.

In a few days I’ll disconnect the mouse, keyboard and monitor from the PC and move the noisy thing it into the utility room where some more network equipment is. This should help with the noise level here in the office.

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Does that look comfortable or what?

Comfortable

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Was there alcohol in the baby bottle?

Thanksgiving, Red Eggs, Elvis and more are in the extended entry …
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On Friday afternoon my Sonicwall decided to bite the dust and go where all bits eventually have to go. Since then I’ve been struggling to get my connection back up and running. Using the Linksys WRT54G as my main Internet Router did not work as advertised and just today I installed a Netgear 8-port router. Looks like things are slowly going back to the normal state. Sigh …

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