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Better safe than sorry
Mar. 6th, 2009 10:37 amApparently a lot of popular LJs are getting hacked. Someone takes control of a moderator's account and pretends the journal is closing, making a post indicating that, and links out to other sites with Cyrillic encoding that have keylogger viruses embedded in them.
Whether this has any particular connection to random Cyrillic users (apparently they're bots, which LJ knows about and refuses to do anything about) friending you, I don't know, but I don't friend them back, and I don't recommend you do, either. Why give someone you don't know access they don't deserve? (Hell, why assign a bot a pronoun IT doesn't deserve?)
For more details, check out this post by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
acari here, along with this post by upstart_crow. I especially recommend downloading one of the Backup options offered in acari's post, because if this happens to you or your journal, it'll be a while before you can get access back, and most likely your LJ entries will be gone.
I use xJournal for regular blogging on Mac OS X, but it doesn't back up as many things as some of the other options do. The Python script is easy to use if you've got an Admin account; I just ran it from Terminal and it's chugging away. LJBook looks cool, but I imagine large journals would be the size of encyclopedias and, should you choose to print them, would cost a pretty penny. Heck, they'd probably be very hefty in MB or GB, too.
I'd also recommend copying your Tag Cloud and Memories List down, so if you DO end up needing to rebuild, at least it'll be easier than trying to remember from nothing.
Other people have already been hacked and lost close to everything, and these bots/hackers/whoever seem to be targeting large and/or popular communities. Know that in ANY of the communities I own or maintain, or any of my journals (all 3 of them), I would NEVER EVER EVER delete my entries or leave LJ without a very lengthy explanation post-- a public one. If it had to include links, it would be links to a site on my OWN domain, not a Cyrillic one.
And seriously? Don't let yourself become vulnerable to these kind of things in the first place. Make sure your anti-virus is up-to-date and running and that you have spyware/malware protection. Verify that both programs (because most "suites" of anti-virus and anti-spyware are too bloated and don't catch everything anyway; better to just get a basic "anti-virus" and a basic "anti-spyware") are legit-- not some random thing on your screen that popped up saying "YOU MAY HAVE SPYWARE11!!eleventy!!"
Whether this has any particular connection to random Cyrillic users (apparently they're bots, which LJ knows about and refuses to do anything about) friending you, I don't know, but I don't friend them back, and I don't recommend you do, either. Why give someone you don't know access they don't deserve? (Hell, why assign a bot a pronoun IT doesn't deserve?)
For more details, check out this post by
acari here, along with this post by upstart_crow. I especially recommend downloading one of the Backup options offered in acari's post, because if this happens to you or your journal, it'll be a while before you can get access back, and most likely your LJ entries will be gone.I use xJournal for regular blogging on Mac OS X, but it doesn't back up as many things as some of the other options do. The Python script is easy to use if you've got an Admin account; I just ran it from Terminal and it's chugging away. LJBook looks cool, but I imagine large journals would be the size of encyclopedias and, should you choose to print them, would cost a pretty penny. Heck, they'd probably be very hefty in MB or GB, too.
I'd also recommend copying your Tag Cloud and Memories List down, so if you DO end up needing to rebuild, at least it'll be easier than trying to remember from nothing.
Other people have already been hacked and lost close to everything, and these bots/hackers/whoever seem to be targeting large and/or popular communities. Know that in ANY of the communities I own or maintain, or any of my journals (all 3 of them), I would NEVER EVER EVER delete my entries or leave LJ without a very lengthy explanation post-- a public one. If it had to include links, it would be links to a site on my OWN domain, not a Cyrillic one.
And seriously? Don't let yourself become vulnerable to these kind of things in the first place. Make sure your anti-virus is up-to-date and running and that you have spyware/malware protection. Verify that both programs (because most "suites" of anti-virus and anti-spyware are too bloated and don't catch everything anyway; better to just get a basic "anti-virus" and a basic "anti-spyware") are legit-- not some random thing on your screen that popped up saying "YOU MAY HAVE SPYWARE11!!eleventy!!"
