Jonno wrote me,
>> where are you, o Violet Blue?
>> i miss you for my love is true.
It’s good to be back. On sunday afternoon, right when I was wrapping up the podcast I did with Boing Boing (!), I noticed something weird happening in my inbox — and it was like a cascading black waterfall of spam down my screen. I realized I was under attack, or something. Then a minute later, I got an account auto-shutdown notice from my (now former) host. A quick call to a service number got a really rude guy who insisted *I was the spammer* and wouldn’t turn my account back on. Tiny Nibbles had been taken offline, and a quick check revealed that I was locked out of *all files* in my account. I couldn’t even get in, and my last backup was partial. It felt like a plastic bag had been pulled over my head.
The full story is after the jump — but I wouldn’t be back online if it wasn’t for my friend Scott Beale (who talked me off a ledge) and Laughing Squid (my new host with the most); Squishy, the beauty who spent a full day lovingly sweetly tenderly moving the *past 5 years of my life* to the new server (and talking me through the darkness, which finally ebbed today); and Jonathan Moore who provided hours of info and insight into what most likely happened during the attack (and took in a wayward panicked girl just before midnight on sunday with a Mac Mini stuffed in her motorcycle bag).
* * * * * * *
I haven’t been responding to emails or calls for a few days, as I’ve been in a strange sort of hell. Besides birthday depression, frustration with Teh Chronic (new nickname as of right now), stuff/drama with boys and all the usual life crap, having the one thing that keeps me connected to myself taken away has been intense. It’s a good lesson; now I can’t be compromised like that again, and I’m even stronger. Go figure.
When the emails started pouring in sunday afternoon I knew something bad was happening; but when I got the shutdown notice I was confused. After some horrifying Kafka-esque communication with Cedant making me have to wait until monday to even talk to someone about getting into my account, then a hysterical call to the only friend I thought might be able to answer my questions — Scott — I assesed the steps I needed to take to get away fron Cedant and make sure this never happens again. Scott explained to me that the reason I was with Cedant, their promise of unlimited bandwidth, was a lie. He commented that closing a customer’s account and taking it offline as reponse to a spam attack is the sign of a really, really bad web host — and I understood immediately that mine (Cedant) was one of the worst. Right then I realized I needed to be on Laughing Squid, where I should have been all along. I mean, as my friend Dave Calkins put it, ‘when a Squid sever goes down, there has been a disturbance in The Force.’
Hours later I found myself still in a state of panic; what if I lost my recent blog archives, which weren’t backed up? And what great timing, the Boing Boing podcast was set to go up tomorrow, and a visit to Tiny Nibbles just timed out… My sex ed files were all going to be okay and my podcast, and videos, but maybe not my blog. I was instantly coming to a lot of realizations about how much my center of personal gravity revolves around blogging — writing and self-publishing. I *need* to write, every day. My immediate relationship with readers — you — is everything to me. And having no family and a *very* unbelivably fucked up past, my blog has become my record of my history; being able to share my history — to see it tangibly — makes me feel like I exist and *matter* all by myself, even though I’m convinced the the universe doesn’t give a fuck about me. Strange, that. It was late and I was alone (just like on my birthday) — off kilter and in need of more information, a nonjudgemental place to weep openly about blog panic, and cuddles, I contacted fellow SRL member and all-around brilliant hottie Jonathan who said, come over, we’ll look at stuff and see what we can figure out. I was all like, but it’s here on my home computer. His response was, um, and your Mac Mini is so non-portable….?
Into the motorcycle bag it went and I raced to his house in a nearbly neighborhood, tucked in a San Francisco nest of Victorians and fog. Looking at what info I had, we concluded that it was a fairly simple, though intense, ‘from’ field spam batch/attack. (This is my translation of what he explained to me; also, I might learn more in the next few days.) It could have been malicious, or just part of how big spammers roll; my domain might have been a random selection, or Joe Bob in the trailer making his everyday living off spam and seeing my heathen commie faggot column in the Teh Chronic, and giving me a little xtra attention in his regular nefarious rounds.
But the proper response from my host should have been to shut down my mailboxes, not take me out. The thing is, I don’t use those mailboxes for anything, they’re not even set up — and Cedant should have been able to see that. I have never sent a single email from Tiny Nibbles. On monday, I finally convinced them to reopen my account so I could get my files and blog — pathetically, they still didn’t understand what happened; hilariously they made me ‘agree’ to remove my blog (cust service guy said happened because of my comments or forms — I’ve never had either) and then they would reopen my account so I could grab my files. I was all like, omigawd, totally ::giggle:: (Fuckers.) Yeah, I’ll remove it — over to Laughing Squid. As if I didn’t already love Laughing Squid enough… now I proudly fly a ‘powered by’ link on my site. Yay!
Incidentally, if you talk with me and I giggle and say blonde valley girl things like ‘like’ and ‘omigawd’ — one of two things might be happening. I’m either a) drunk and happy and silly and having a great time and you are part of it; or, b) I am silently reading the Necronomicon backwards in my head so the forces of darkness will swallow your soul at the next available moment.
Now, back to “normal”.
