
Hello everyone,
You may or may not be aware of MMO Fallout’s recent downtime, stemming from a concentrated attempt at breaking into our WordPress database. The attack was unsuccessful, however it brought the website down for most of the day. In response, we are making some back end changes to beef up security. The most notable change on your end is that our URLs have been drastically altered down to a simple p=[numbers] formula. With that knowledge that doing so would result in killing MMO Fallout’s ranking with search engines, we made the decision because shorter URLs will benefit our security in the long run.
I like to talk about security here every once in a while because it gives our viewers a behind the scenes look at how vile and destructive the internet can be. Now consider that MMO Fallout has no financial incentive: We sell nothing so breaching our walls would accomplish absolutely nothing. We have no customers, and as such no customer databases to break into. We have no advertisers apart from that Google Ads bit you see at the top. And still, the attempts to break into this website continue to rise every month, almost doubling with each month’s passing. These are mostly random drive-by hackings by bots that have no one at the controls and have no idea who we are.
I’ll say that again: Most of our breach attempts are almost by happenstance. I was amazed when I checked our logs one month after I installed a new security apparatus and found that there were just short of seven thousand bad login attempts between mid-April and mid-May, and well over twenty thousand 404 intrusions (this apparently indicates that someone is phishing for holes). Over thirty one thousand events logged for that one month, on a website that is famous by almost nobody’s standard, and one which admittedly just got a lot less popular since a good 75% of our traffic is based in Google/Bing/Yahoo and that was just reset.
The URL change isn’t the only thing we’ve done, and was necessary because another system we put into place actively prevents us from using long URLs for our links (long links sink ships, I hear) but I really don’t want to go into what those systems are for the sake of security. As I said in a previous post, MMO Fallout may occasionally break while we test out new systems, and I want to thank all of you for sticking with us.
With the summer on us, I am continuing work on some higher quality entertainment to bring you all.