Putin and Me
(Why Fair & Unbalanced Is Down)

The blog had been my favorite hobby since 2008.
Several hundred viewers seemed to like it.

Then, suddenly, everyone including me got this:

The host provider, Bluehost, said someone had accessed the site and planted malware. Dozens of files were corrupted, and dangerous to access.
What seems to be a burgeoning fun activity from the basements of parents is breaking into whatever sites can be accessed and committing mayhem.

Damn teenage hackers, right?
Well… Not so fast, Boomer (that would be me).

Word Press offers, for a limited time, a limited list of recent login attempts.
The last one had an IP address: 5.183.130.233

The WhoIs website helpfully traces owners of urls and IP addresses – and does it for free (That makes it attractive to a retired, and very cheap, child of the Truman administration)
Just for giggles, take a look:
https://www.whois.com/whois/5.183.130.233

You just might get the same result I did.

So who the hell is the Biterika Grupp?
And a Moscow corporation? Really?

Okay, so Google is still our friend, right?
Well… except for privacy. Still…

Turns out a non-zero number of complaints against the Biterika Group have to do with brute force attempts at hacking into minor websites.

So why me?
A small blog with a small, friendly readership with similar interests.

Hardly a threat to the erstwhile Putin empire of the future.

Well, Taegan Goddard is a must-read, and there is this…

A high percentage of the misinformation on social media comes from Putin paid trolls.
Many are new. Many are clumsy.

They make mistakes.
Which makes them fun for aging denisons like me.

Like this one who claimed to be a US combat veteran.
He posted a photo with a background of the White House, thinking it was in Minnesota.

You got here last month & got a couple hundred follows from very new accounts.

Could be coincidence.

Except you are an extreme rarity:
an "American" who does not recognize the White House. It is the full background of what you insist is Minneapolis.

Foreign troll farm much?

— Burr Deming – @BurrLand01@mastodon.world (@BurrLand01) August 8, 2024

Or this combat veteran claiming to have been awarded a military medal for his heroism in battle.
The award he mentioned was for infantry bravery.
The battle he insisted it came from was a raid conducted entirely by air.

To speed things up, you can tell your employers that it is a United States military code, not British.
A real member of the Royal Air Force would not use the term but would be familiar with it.

And the ground combat medals you boasted about. How did someone on a plane get those?

— Burr Deming – @BurrLand01@mastodon.world (@BurrLand01) November 12, 2021

Or this American who got mixed up on which accusations were against which candidate.
He referred to what he insisted bogus accusations against Trump, involving Russian hooks.
Although he sprinkled his language with y’all‘s, he couldn’t remember the word “hooker”.

Sorry for the lack of clarity.

I didn't mean to imply that I expected anything at all from you.

BTW, "y'all" is an American idiom (Very good), but "Russian hooks" probably comes from another culture.
You may want to review your training.https://t.co/vKDgRNHmPC

— Burr Deming – @BurrLand01@mastodon.world (@BurrLand01) October 1, 2024

It was entertainment for me, but perhaps embarrassing for the occasional low-level employee of a troll farm.

Could some angry troll have diverted a small bit of Biterika Group attention to the posted website of this gloating American?

Could be, I suppose.
Or it could be an undifferentiated attack on thousands of minor blog sites.

Or it could be something else.

Infidel753 has advice I wish I had followed.

Meanwhile, I’ll try keeping up from here at Red-State-Blues