Not-quite hacked

This week, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Twitter, along with several other news organizations, have all announced that they were attacked by (most likely) Chinese hackers.

I am not quite happy to join their ranks: for the last few months, the traffic on this blog has been vastly dominated by attempts to get into the various back-end scripts that run this site, either by direct password hacks or just denial-of-service attacks. In fact, I only noticed it because the hackers exceeded my bandwidth allowance by a factor of a few (and costing me a few hundred bucks in over-usage charged by my host in the process, unfortunately).

I’ve since attempted to block the attacks by denying access to the IP addresses which have been the most active (mostly from domains that look like 163data.com.cn, for what it’s worth). So, my apologies if any of this results in any problems for anyone else trying to access the blog.