Since installing Google Analytics I have been checking my webstats on a near daily basis. However, because of my lack of blogging over the last few weeks I have also been monitoring the stats less. Today I learnt my lesson that maybe I should maintain a daily watch. Over the last few days (yesterday in particular) there has been a dramatic spike in the number of visits to my site despite no new blog posts being added.

Looking at the data in more detail it appears a lot of traffic is being generated out of China by a site called qq829.com

Looking into this some more there is this thread on a lot of traffic appearing from China and on the Google Analytics forum.

Furthermore both HubPages and Symantic have information on the Trojan that is causing the problem.

At this stage it does not appear that my website has been infected with Malware or compromised in anyway, however, please ensure that your antivirus software is up to date as this particular Trojan could be costing you a lot of traffic and could potentially cause other problems.

Furthermore I have now blocked traffic originating from the qq829 website, other people are blocking all of China but at this stage I am not considering it.

If you are facing similar weird problems with bursts of traffic to your site you can block the qq829 website by adding these lines to your .htaccess file.

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^qq829" TOBLOCK=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^cnzz" TOBLOCK=1

<FilesMatch "(.*)">
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=TOBLOCK
</FilesMatch>

deny from 219.232.240.0/20
deny from 203.171.224.0/20

This video is a little silly at the start but later on does well to explain the inside workings of how someone can break into your computer when you do not have up to date security updates and anti-virus installed.

Okay in the last week I have had to do a windows installation and a linux installation onto a laptop.

In the past the windows install would have won hands down in terms of getting everything running out of the box. But not any longer, I now think that over the last two years linux has really come of age and is just simple to use and for the most part just works.

Firstly my experiences in windows installing.

• Insert CD rom and install OS – about 30 minutes.
• Remove cd rom restart do end user install, about another 30 minutes.
• Boot into windows remove norton anti virus, install avast and do a boot time scan to ensure that in the few seconds between norton and avast nothing snuck onto the system – 1 hour.
• Download and install windows updates 10 minutes to download 1 hour to install.
• Reboot and install firefox and thunderbird 30 minutes.

All up for a basic working machine: 3.5 hours.

Linux installation.

• Install OS from cd rom… 20 minutes
• Reboot do end user install 10 minutes.
• Get wireless networking drivers working – 1 hour.
• Download and install updates less than 30 minutes.
• Install anti-virus… not needed it is linux.
• Install other software… apt-get install software name… under 5 minutes per piece of software.

All up… 2 hours… an hour of which was getting drivers for a wifi card to work, and if hardware vendors properly supported linux you could have a fully functioning up to date OS in under 1 hour.

Two years ago a linux set up would have taken days because of driver problems and even dependancy problems, but now linux has really matured and unless windows can improve its security a lot then in the long run linux will just become more and more popular.

….

Now of course people are going to come back and say that windows has more security holes because more people use it so therefore it is easier to break and if linux increased in popularity more people would write viruses and try to break it too. I do think there is half a point here. However for the most part linux makes you manually do stuff where windows if sometimes just a little to smart for its own good. I placed a flash drive into my computer yesterday that had a virus on it set to autorun, lucky for me my system stopped it. However, why windows insists on letting flash drives autorun is just plain weird… so windows getting lots of viruses is as much microsoft’s slack approach to system security as is it the fault of the virus writers themselves. Then again if there wasn’t security holes in windows norton and mcaffee would be out of work so there is an economics side to viruses as well.