But, as of today, I’m back in business!
I’ve started a new job, with the IT operations staff at Arkiv Øst. This organization maintains archives for various municipalities in the southeast of Norway, as well as for the county municipality of Østfold Viken Østfold.

I’m looking forward to a long and fruitful employment.

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Here are a few telltale signs that you could be in trouble:

Google displays a warning about your site in its search results:

Neither of which is a guarantee that your site is currently hacked, but either is definitely a sign that you should check your site with a fine-toothed comb!

Chrome sees red when you access your site.

Google visits (almost) the entire Internet on a regular basis and has its ways to detect when ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’, so to speak. It will alert you with a big fat red warning (if you’re using Chrome):

Your robots.txt file has been modified.

This method is a beauty of simplicity: All the culprit has to do is add the following two lines above the existing content of the robots.txt et voilà! Google and other search engines will stop indexing the site and anything already indexed will drop in rank or get removed altogether. And let’s face it: unless you have some very special site, the majority of your visitors are organic traffic (aka they found your page/site via a search engine)
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This will tell anything (mostly search engines) which checks your robots.txt file for information that you want none of your pages indexed.

(WordPress specific) Check the WordPress-FAQ

WordPress provides a thorough list of things to check when you suspect your WordPress-based site has been hacked.

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People are getting more and more dependent on social media, like Facebook. A minority(?) is downright addicted to social media, but the large majority of people do rely on them for reviews, opinions, and other information.

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Well, not according to ‘Kamden Creger’, who decided to send me this email (on one of my former email addresses), with the subject ‘keep calm’:

Hi

I run a forum in the darknet, I sell all kinds of services – above all it is demolition to property and harm. Basically, all but the shooting. Often main reasons are unrequited love or competition at workplace. This week she contacted me and gave me the mission of empty sourness in your face. Standard practice – fast, hurts, forever. Without too much fuss. I get receive only after finishing the task. So, now I offer you pay me to be inactive, I suggest this to nearly all the victims. If I do not receive money from you, then my man will fulfill the order. If you give me money, besides to my inactivity, I will provide you the information that I have about the client. After finishing the mission, I always spend the performer, so I have a choice, to get $1300 from you for information about the customer and my inaction, or to receive $ 4000 from the customer, but with a big probability of spending the performer.

I’m getting payments in bitcoins, its my bitcoin address – 1E8GsnJ7UAwVpFhARMNdcfJ6a1GLPvWNZ8
The amount I told above.
Two days to decide and pay.

Don’t go for nonsense like this. A good giveaway that this person isn’t serious is that he wants payment in dollars, but deposited in a bitcoin wallet.
Report it to the proper authorities (assuming you reside in a country where they actually give a cr*p. Here in Norway the current advice from the authorities is to delete emails like this, and that’s it! )

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• Tom Clancy (1947-2013), known for his technically detailed espionage and military science storylines set during and after the Cold War.
• Michael Crichton (1942-2008), known for his work in the science fiction, thriller, and medical fiction genres.
• Ken Follett (1949- ), known for his thrillers and historical novels.
• Robin Cook (1940- ), known for combining medical writing with the thriller genre.

As you can see on my Goodreads profile, I’m currently going through the books of Robin Cook, more or less in chronological order. When I’m done with his works I may do the same with Michael Crichton. Haven’t quite decided yet.

One thing’s for certain: almost all of their books are so much better than movies/TV series based on them. I have watched quite a few movies & TV series based on works by Michael Crichton, Ken Follett & Robin Cook and so far the only advantage of them, over the books, is that they take less time to consummate.

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Posting it here so that anyone else who got this knows it should be ignored.
The following email originated from Korry Maykis (ujpamgnk[at]outlook.com) and was sent to one of my previous email accounts. The email’s subject mentioned a username/password combo I’m sure I’ve used sometimes, way back. Unfortunately, I don’t recall which site(s) I used it on.

Lets get directly to the purpose. Not one person has paid me to investigate you. You do not know me and you’re most likely thinking why you are getting this e mail?

In fact, I actually placed a software on the 18+ videos (pornographic material) web-site and there’s more, you visited this site to experience fun (you know what I mean). When you were watching videos, your browser initiated working as a RDP with a keylogger which provided me accessibility to your display and also cam. after that, my software program obtained your complete contacts from your Messenger, FB, and e-mailaccount. And then I created a double-screen video. 1st part shows the video you were watching (you have a fine taste : )), and next part displays the view of your cam, and it is u.

You have got two different choices. We should check out these choices in aspects:

Very first solution is to disregard this e mail. Consequently, I most certainly will send your actual video recording to every one of your personal contacts and think concerning the shame you will definitely get. Not to mention should you be in an affair, how it would affect?

In the second place solution will be to pay me $7000. Lets think of it as a donation. In this instance, I most certainly will asap discard your video recording. You can carry on with your life like this never occurred and you never will hear back again from me.

You’ll make the payment by Bitcoin (if you do not know this, search for “how to buy bitcoin” in Google).

BTC Address to send to: 1Cjy1GiHXCAEh3DokmCjmtXYWk7xHLV4Gm [case-sensitive, copy and paste it]

If you have been thinking of going to the law, good, this e mail can not be traced back to me. I have dealt with my actions. I am also not attempting to charge you much, I prefer to be paid. I’ve a special pixel within this e-mail, and now I know that you have read this e mail. You now have one day to make the payment. If I do not get the BitCoins, I will definitely send out your video to all of your contacts including members of your family, colleagues, and many others. Nonetheless, if I receive the payment, I will destroy the recording immediately. It is a nonnegotiable offer, that being said don’t waste my personal time and yours by responding to this mail. If you need proof, reply with Yes! & I will send your video to your 10 friends.

They’re making quite a few assumptions here:

• I have colleagues
• I have at least 10 friends

Don’t fall for nonsense like this, and please leave a comment if you’ve received a similar email. And if you can give some idea of which site they got the username/password combo mentioned in the subject from, that would be swell

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The list:

• No broken links
• A valid/proper SSL-certificate
• No mixed content
• Best practices followed: PageSpeed & YSlow
• Mobile-friendly / AMP
• SEO

I’ll go a bit more into detail for each of these items:

No internal broken links whatsoever

This has applied to websites since the beginning of times. There is no excuse to have any internal 404 (Not found) errors on your website. Period.
It’s also good practice to verify all links to external pages as well every now and then. If you’re using a CMS like WordPress, all you need is a plugin like Broken Link Checker to automate this process.

Both internal and external links are easily checked with LinkChecker. Run this before you put your site live, and you won’t look like a newcomer with a 404-littered-site.

SSL is a must in 2020

Google will start to name and shame any site which doesn’t use HTTPS, starting summer 2018. They have been pushing towards HTTPS for a while now, and more and more sites have deployed SSL on their web servers. Some currently already force everyone on https, others leave it up to the visitors.

Keep in mind that not just any SSL certificate will do. You need a proper certificate and an equally properly configured server. Luckily the good people at the SSL Labs division of Qualys provide an excellent tool which lets you verify your certificate: the SSL Server Test.
As a rule of thumb, all your servers should rate A or A+.
(And please make sure your server listens to HTTPS for both [yourdomain] & www.[yourdomain]. You’d be surprised how many companies screw up this utterly basic item.

An A or A+ SSL-certificate doesn’t have to cost you anything. SSL certificates used to be quite expensive. Thanks to the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), this is a thing of the past. Their Let’s Encrypt certificate authority lets you issue rock-solid SSL-certificates which are totally free of charge.

Another good alternative would be CloudFlare. The site you’re reading this post on has been using CloudFlare for many years now, and we’ve been very satisfied with their (free!) services.
Free SSL-certificates is just one of the many perks one gets when using CloudFlare. Check out their site for all the security & performance features they offer, most of them free of charge.
If you want to see how their SSL-certificates rate, check the rating for this site.

No mixed content

Now that you have an SSL-certificate, make sure that all elements are served via HTTPS. There’s a good chance that your site contains hard-coded references to elements served over HTTP. As soon as you have one/more of these, it’s about as bad as having no SSL to begin with…
LexiConn Internet Services lets you test for this quite easily with their Why No Padlock? tool.

PageSpeed & YSlow

These are 2 lists of best practices, developed by Google and Yahoo. Thanks to GTmetrix checking how well your site ranks is a breeze. Enter your site URL on their site (at the very least check your front page there) and they’ll give it a percentage-score between 0-100 for both PageSpeed & YSlow. Again, as a rule of thumb, you should have > 75 for both. GTmetrix will tell you exactly why your score is (far) below 100 so you can inform your site developers what you want to have improved.

Mobile-Friendly

In addition to GTmetrix, check your site also with the Mobile-Friendly Test provided by Google. We’re living in 2020 and you’re most likely getting more visitors from mobile phones & tablets than from desktop/laptops.

Another check to perform is whether your site serves valid AMP pages, where applicable. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, a Google-backed project designed as an open standard for any publisher to have pages load quickly on mobile devices.

SEO

[coming soon]

If your site checks off on this little list of basic website requirements, you’re good to go for 2020

[I’ll expand/correct this post if/when needed.]

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Men, women… and ladies

I was checking out the various Olympic events on the official 2018 Winter Olympics website and happened to notice that, whereas males are always referred to as ‘men’, it’s not quite so simple when it comes to the females.
Of the 15 sports which make up the 2018 Winter Olympics, 5 refer to females as ‘ladies’ & 9 refer to them as ‘women’ (1 sport, Nordic combined, will first accept any female participation at the 2022 Winter Olympics).

Here’s the whole list:

Why is this? Well… I haven’t the foggiest idea! Why would a female be a lady when she skates on a 400m track (speed skating), but ‘only’ a woman when she does the 111.111m track (short track speed skating)?

Gentlemen?

In case you wonder why males are always referred to as ‘men’ and never as ‘gentlemen’ (the male version of ‘ladies’): Well… we may have Sjinkie to ‘thank’ for that!

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Were these guys separated at birth? Mark Zuckerberg is quite the celeb, but I dare to present that Miles Teller looks like his long-lost twin, especially during his first scene in ‘Project X’.
I know they do differ about 3 years in age, but I still think they could be brothers… at the very least!

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	The Nekteck 5.4A USB-C Car Charger Adapter. It features an additional standard USB A port allows your to Charge Non-USBC devices at FULL speed simultaneously 5.4A(Shared by 2 ports: 3.0A, 2.4A). It uses Smart sense IC Technology so that each port intelligently identifies your device and seeks to maximise its charging speed.
	The Anker PowerCore+ 20100. This is a 20100mAh Portable Charger with USB-C Port. The aluminum-alloy casing holds components that are capable of providing USB and USB-C output, with PowerIQ high-speed charging technology.
	The original OnePlus OTG cable/adapter. With this OTG adapter (you can hardly call it a cable, since it's only 10 cm long) you can connect a USB stick or drive to your phone, and access its data.

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And what (almost) 9 years they have been:

• We moved twice into bigger, newer, better offices.
• The number of employees has more than doubled.
• A second office was opened (in Oslo).
• MarkedsPartner (the subsidiary of Omnicom where most of my colleagues are employed) has become a force to be reckoned with when it comes to Inbound Marketing.

Finishing a chapter

But now the time has come for them and me to go our separate ways.
I’m going to miss my colleagues. I’ve learned a lot from them, and I hope they picked up a thing or two from me as well. I would like to thank each and every one of them for the time together. In some cases, this was as short as a couple of months, but many have been there with me the entire time.
(I could list all their names here, but out of fear of forgetting one, I won’t do that.)

What’s next?

I have nothing concrete yet on what I will do next but I am checking out some alternatives and considering options. Hopefully, I’ll land something in the region since commuting to/from Oslo on a daily basis isn’t too high on my wish list…

First a bit of R&R though. As IT-sjef I was ‘on the job’ more or less 24/7, and it sure feels good to go ‘offline’ for a bit, every now and then.

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Who was affected?

Many companies and organisations were affected. To name a few:

• Many NHS hospitals in the UK
• the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation / Министерство внутренних дел, МВД
• the Ministry of the Russian Federation for Affairs for Civil Defence, Emergencies and Elimination of Consequences of Natural Disasters / Министерство России по делам гражданской обороны, чрезвычайным ситуациям и ликвидации последствий стихийных бедствий
• MegaFon
• Choice Hotels
• BUYTEC
• etc, etc, etc

Why did it stop?

Allededly the spreading of the ransomware has been stopped by a UK cybersecurity researcher. He found and activated a kill-switch in the software. This switch was hardcoded into the malware, probably in case the creator wanted to stop it from spreading further. By registering a certain domain name, one which the ransomware checks before it starts encrypting, he was able to stop the ransomware dead in its tracks. It doesn’t cure already infected systems, but it keeps the ransomware from becoming active on any new machines (provided they’re connected to the Internet).
He also set up an online tracker, which illustrates the worldwide spread of the ransomware. Based on this data, the New York Times has created a nice animated map.

Be vigilant!

I hope this attack is an eyeopener for many people. The Internet is a (potentially) scary place, just like for example the highway. There are rules to abide to, common sense to stick to, and protection to use. There is a reason people don’t ride bicycles on the highway, but instead enclose themselves in a metal box, with safety belts and air bags. Cruising the Internet is no different. You also need your metal box (firewall), safety belts (antivirus software) and your air bags (backup).

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