Images Temporarily Disabled

[Alton]

I'm temporarily disabled some image capabilities in order to isolate a cost issue.

[Ryan]

Thanks Alton! Thanks as always for providing the website for free with no ads for everyone.

[LeopardSkin]

Thanks muchly for well service.

[Alton]

I think I found the root cause ...

ClaudeBot/1.0 is aggressively harvesting content from WTFBC to train their LLM's.

Claude (Anthropic) is the biggest competitor to OpenAI.

Other culprits include the AmazonBot, ByteDance (TikTok).

This morning I've denied access to all these bots

Fingers crossed.

Sadly, we're entering a dystopian future with all this AI / LLM bullshit

[Ryan]

Good to hear. On the bright side at least our AI overlords will know something about windsports.

[Alton]

Looks like someone else in Azure Toronto is attempting a SQL injection attack

Maybe this is the big culprit all this time

4.206.81.128 - - [09/Sep/2024:16:38:35 +0000] "GET /photoalbum.php?id=1343+%2F%2A%2A%2F%2F%2A%2A%2FOR%2F%2A%2A%2FROW%282018%2C1386%29%3E%28SELECT%2F%2A%2A%2FCOUNT%28%2A%29%2CCONCAT%280x4c68454a%2C%28SELECT%2F%2A%2A%2FIFNULL%28CAST%28COUNT%28schema_name%29%2F%2A%2A%2FAS%2F%2A%2A%2FNCHAR%29%2C0x20%29%2F%2A%2A%2FFROM%2F%2A%2A%2FINFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMATA%29%2C0x59566c56%2CFLOOR%28RAND%280%29%2A2%29%29x%2F%2A%2A%2FFROM%2F%2A%2A%2F%28SELECT%2F%2A%2A%2F2027%2F%2A%2A%2FUNION%2F%2A%2A%2FSELECT%2F%2A%2A%2F8505%2F%2A%2A%2FUNION%2F%2A%2A%2FSELECT%2F%2A%2A%2F7491%2F%2A%2A%2FUNION%2F%2A%2A%2FSELECT%2F%2A%2A%2F4808%29a%2F%2A%2A%2FGROUP%2F%2A%2A%2FBY%2F%2A%2A%2Fx%29 HTTP/1.1" 403 177 "-" "Opera/9.64 (Macintosh; PPC Mac OS X; U; en) Presto/2.1.1"

[Ryan]

Interesting, ChatGPT came up with this below. But the SQL seems to be just trying to collect schema information at this point.

Conclusion:
This request appears to be part of an SQL Injection attack targeting the photoalbum.php page by manipulating the id parameter to execute malicious SQL code. The server correctly blocked it with a 403 Forbidden response.

[Alton]

Interesting, ChatGPT came up with this below. But the SQL seems to be just trying to collect schema information at this point.

Conclusion:
This request appears to be part of an SQL Injection attack targeting the photoalbum.php page by manipulating the id parameter to execute malicious SQL code. The server correctly blocked it with a 403 Forbidden response.

Yep. I just put a rule in nginx to deny access (403) to user agents containing "presto" ... tough luck to Opera browser users.

[Brian C]

Glad you know what you’re talking about- that’s all Geek-Greek to me. Big Thank You for keeping the site working though!

[Alton]

Yesterday, there were 4 million SQL injection attempts over 3 hrs ... which is over 350 requests per second.

That's insane