Feng Shui / Dharma Talk with Master Richard Yan

Around mid-June, we noticed that one of our psychic web pages was hacked 3 times. The hack altered one of the web page content resulting all of our Google Ads to show up with Viagra and other inappropriate pharmaceutical advertisements. In addition, the hack caused our news rss automation and sitemap to be blocked by major search engines from indexing. Though we managed to quickly undo the damage, the hacker would repeat the same hack within a few days. After dealing with the third hack attack in 1 week time, we finally resolved the issue by upgrading our content management script program.

Although the upgrade has eradicated the hacker, we could not figure out what led to the security leak in the first place until we did some serious web research on the topic. We discovered that hackers and spammers often exploit other websites by using proxy servers to bypass certain websites' restrictions. Henceforth, we add special filter codes for www.Intuitive-Soul.com. These codes will certainly not affect legitimate visitors from accessing the website. It will only affect those who fits the criteria of our filtered requirements.

Basically, the updated security system will effectively filter 98% of proxy server users from accessing our website. Unfortunately, legitimate visitors like AOL users would also be affected and automatically banned from our website. Since majority of our visitors are not AOL users, we will not be bothered to make any exception for users belonging to this group. For the sake of site security, we are willing to lose visitors from this small population.

Since the new code implementation, we have noticed a remarkable decline in our website bandwidth usage as well as the number of spambots per visits. Furthermore, we are also receiving zero spam mails since we changed 2 email addresses permanently.

Our new security set up is finally stabilized and we are done with code twinkling for now.