Changelog
Browse: [2007] - [2006] - [2005] - [2004]
30 December 2004
The XSS attack lasted for 3 days roughly, from 25-27 Dec. There were two variants of the Santy worm
that attempted to seize control of the machine. The system permanently banned 124 unique hosts. Most
of which (if not all) are corporate servers and not naive home-users' machines. This brings me
to the point that the companies, which have the capacity to secure their on-line systems, blatantly
disregard those security issues, effectively handing themselves and their customers to act as proxies
of more sophisticated attacks. Several of those hosts, which I have briefly profiled, are running cPanel, a
piece of software that is known to have had several vulnerabilities. Concluding, while it is very
common to receive all sorts of attacks, I am afraid this attack involved another factor, usually
overlooked. The attackers directed the attack over three days at which everyone in the western
world is on vacation for Christmas. It makes me think that we are going to start seeing more and more
human and social factors involved in coordinated, automated and distributed attacks/worms.
25 December 2004
Merry Christmas! I was not going to make an update today, but receiving some alert emails from the server's IDS
I thought it is a good idea.
At around 3am a wave of hack attempts hit the server. They are using an XSS type of attack leading to
http://www.visualcoders.net and attempt to download on this machine malicious perl scripts. What these people do not know
is that the system filters out things like that, so they have to try slightly harder to get in. Their ips
, hacked machines or not, have all been banned permanently.
28 November 2004
- Google has a relatively new service, Google Scholar, in beta state. It is a free search service for academics and researchers. I have added a link to it on the links page. I tried a few queries, but their database seem to not be very complete yet, so I did not alter the direct searching features from the main Google to this service, but that may happen when the service gets out of its beta status.
- I wanted to make sure it is clear to visitors of this site, that linking directly to a particular reference in this library is not guaranteed to always return you the same result. Even though I have no plans to change their unique id numbers, it is possible in the future that I will need to shift things around. Having said that, mainly for university students, I would like to point out that you should not in any case add a reference on any of your project reports back to this site, simply because this is not acceptable or a good practise. The existence of this site, at this very location, depends on my presence at this institute. The correct way to reference material found here, is to obtain and use the data provided in its BibTex entry.
- If you do want to link to this website either way, please use this url: http://www.npcglib.org (https, for the security minded, is also available)
2 November 2004
I added a Google search feature for those authors
that their homepage is not set within the system.
30 October 2004
- Finally, for those who are looking for the paper, you will find this icon
on the expanded description of each reference. It initiates a search on Google, so that they
can easily locate the actual file. The search, which is by Google limited to 10 words maximum,
splices together the first author's surname and the title of the paper. On just about every one
I tested it, the actual paper is within the first 5 hits Google returns. - All-around upgrade of the server. Please report back any bugs.
- Added basic ordering for search results.
23 October 2004
Many fixes and a few new additions, some new features on the system too. There are still
a lot of references to be added. Unfortunately, it is not possible to keep track of the
homepages of the 600+ authors. Drop me a
message if you spot any obsolete links.
30 August 2004
I have added some more useful external links.
Many of the references suffer a little problem where their metadata seem to be missing
from their description. That metadata can be found in the "note" field of their BibTeX entry,
until I find time to insert them on their respective fields. I also did a number of small
bugfixes on the system's engine. For those who are wondering as to why existing references appear
on the "10 most recent" list, this happens as I correct their metadata and will be stabilized soon.
04 August 2004
The new version of the library is in place. The references need to be fixed, but that's underway.
The whole database has been redone, so now it's much more flexible and extendable. Some of the
new end-user features include:
- New search engine.
- Better BibTeX generation. (still have to handle some special character - French mainly)
- Improved interface.
- Fast generation of statistics. (a speed improvement of roughly 95%)
- Proper pagination of search results.
13 June 2004
As of 13th June the system undergoes a significant upgrade (database restructuring, entry updates/corrections,
administration modules) and may suffer minor downtime. As a secondary note, there is an increasing
amount of attacks against this server. From now on these hosts will be denied access permanently and
their respective service providers may be notified.