My education as a webmistress...
As some of you who have been frequenting knot-heads.com know, I had a message board. It was never a very active community; in fact, the most members I ever had was 48... and a couple of those memberships were generated by bots linking to porn sites. Still, I slowly learned how to administer the thing. I added a bunch of new smilies and enjoyed a couple of regular posters who kept my forum alive. Imagine my surprise when on February 25, 2005, I logged onto the message board portion of my website and found that it was hacked by some guy calling himself Hacker_ABT!
My once blue message board was now a black page littered with Arabic words written in red. The graffiti artist had also left a sound clip for my listening pleasure of someone chanting or moaning in Arabic. For a moment, I considered getting my sister to translate for me. She happens to be fluent in Arabic because she used to live in Morocco and Egypt. But then I decided it wasn't worth the trouble to consult her.
I ended up deleting my old message board, because frankly I'm dumb when it comes to dealing with hackers. I'll freely admit that I'm a beginning webmistress. Besides, there was another message board available by my web host. I decided to just reinstall my board and start all over again, as much as it pained me to do so. I actually liked the other board better, but the new one seems to be more secure... at least for now.
I pretty much forgot about the hack job until a couple of days ago, when I was looking at the logs of people who have accessed my website. First of all, I noticed that several folks from Saudi Arabia have been on my site. Then, I noticed a strange referral to a website I have never heard of. When I followed the link, I found that it led to a message board written entirely in Arabic. Obviously, I couldn't translate it, so I went to the root of the site. Sure enough, it was my old friend Hacker_ABT's homepage! He must have been bored, because he's already accessed my site a few times this month and it's only been April for a few days.
Look around knot-heads.com, though, and you'll see that there's almost nothing controversial on it. My husband, who is an American soldier, had written a short essay about his experience at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Per his request, I have deleted that page. I wrote an essay about what September means to me now. I've deleted that page as well.
But I decided that I didn't want Hacker_ABT back to my site... or at least, I wanted to make it harder for him. I decided to start by blocking his site from accessing my site. I went searching for his IP address, but only came up with a URL. I was about to give up and go away. By pure dumb luck, however, before I split, I decided to try to translate the site and then check the website's properties. When I did that, Hacker_ABT's IP address came up. I copied it and entered it into my IP deny manager. Then I looked at the logs on my webalizer. I saw a few suspicious looking IP addresses and looked them up. Sure enough, they also belonged to someone in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. I did a little more research and found out via another messageboard that whoever owned those IP addresses had also hacked someone else's forum. 
Thanks to Hacker_ABT, I have learned more about how to be a good webmistress. I am also paying a lot more attention to who is accessing my website. Sadly, that means that I am going to have to be a lot meaner about banning suspicious people from being on knot-heads.com. 
My website is pretty insignificant out there in internet land. In fact, I suspect that it barely makes the search engines. But as long as it's my little spot on the web, I intend to protect it to the best of my ability... and my defense skills can only get better.
A few other sites that have been hacked...
And just because I'm feeling vindictive, here are the IP addresses of the scumbag(s) who have been lurking around on my website... I figure that other folks who have worked hard on their websites might want to be proactive and ban Mr. Hacker_ABT before he trashes their message boards too.
216.239.39.104
212.138.64.176
212.138.64.171
212.138.64.172
212.138.64.173
212.138.64.174
Go away, you worthless shitheads...