Hacked!

Oh well isn't that cute... someone hacked my webcomic!

Of course, I'm not exactly clueless when it comes to these things, so after verifying the extent of the damage, I did some digging through the logs.

Ready for a laugh?

"K4Rel," the Iranian "L337 H4x0r!" who defaced my site is a complete poseur!

The actual break-in was done on Monday by someone in Jakarta, Indonesia.  They found a way in, uploaded a backdoor for themselves (the quite useful "b374k" php script), and changed the (hashed) passwords for the admin section. Once finished, it appears this individual passed off (or let's be honest, probably sold) the admin passwords to a second person.

The second guy actually was from Iran.  But he was only able to add a new "comic" to the database, as you can see above, and wasn't able to touch anything else on the site.  Heck, he barely even did that - the internal page id had incremented by two, which means he effed it up the first time and had to try again!  Laaame.

For the technically curious:  the original Indonesian hacker used classic SQL injection.  SomeryC, the extremely lightweight comic-oriented CMS I use for Directionless, was doing nothing to sanitize the page number in the URLs.  This allowed him to edit the hashed passwords for the admin section.  From there, he used the comic uploader to install the backdoor script, and after that appears to have left the server alone, after passing it off to the Iranian "hacker" (and for him, I use the term very loosely indeed...)

Over the last few hours, I've restored Directionless to normal.  Will helped me with some of the PHP, so the site should no longer respond to bogus input.  Additionally, I have put the entire admin section between an additional level of security with htaccess, and of course, changed all the passwords. DirectionlessComic.com should be secure now, at least from this type of attack.

Webcomics!

I'll probably put something on Facebook once this stuff gets closer to reality, but I figure'd I'll mention it here first.

Longtime followers of my online activities will be familiar with the two webcomics I've worked on in the past: Medieval Mayhem, the borderline-8-Bit-Theater-ripoff sprite comic I made in junior high, and Directionless, the semi-autobiographical borderline-MacHall-ripoff I briefly made during my freshman year of college. After my life got a little too busy spring of freshman year, I abandoned that comic and haven't really done anything since. That's about to change...

One of the classes I'm taking right now is TRF414: Writing and Designing for Interactive Media. Turns out this class is mostly a "how to make web pages with Dreamweaver and HTML" class. Clearly, well below my ability level, and the professor knows this. So instead of sitting bored in class as we do things I've known about for years (this is a "tag") he's allowed me to basically turn the credits into an individual guided study sort of thing.

Directionless
For this class (and really, I think getting a grade on this will be pretty good motivation!) I will be bringing back Directionless. Instead of the clunky free hosting I had on Comic Genesis last time, I'll be getting the comic it's own domain, and piggy-backing on the server space for Hanley Films. I know some of my friends from high school (Halapy in particular... thanks for nagging!) liked to read the comic the last time I did it, and since then I've had several people here ask "why don't you do more of those - you should put us in it!" so there's plenty of reason outside of the TRF class to do this as well.

Plus, I don't have any film/video production classes this semester, and if all I do creatively is write, I'll go crazy!

The resurrected comic will follow the same format as before: semi-autobiographical, but probably about as loyal to the facts as the father in Big Fish... However, I will likely be the only returning character, since I don't really see much of the guys from my floor freshman year anymore. Instead, the new comic will focus around the group of friends I tend to hang out with now (don't worry - we're all plenty crazy too!)

The website will take a while to put together, since I plan on making it much nicer than my previous ones: probably a dynamic PHP site with a MySQL backend to make uploading new comics really easy once it's all running. Now, my previous experience with MySQL is approximately... none. So while that's all coming together, I can hopefully get a buffer of comics going so I won't miss as many updates as I've been known to in the past!

So, expect to see more on Directionless v.2 in a few weeks!

Medieval Mayhem
What? You thought I'd forget this classic? Though Medieval Mayhem only ran for 32 actual strips, and I don't really want to revisit making sprite comics, it was fairly humorous, and had a halfway decent following for what it was. (hell, the guy behind Elftor make a guest comic!)

Because of this, I'm looking into options for something my mother has been asking for for a long time - a printed book. I'm still looking into it, but it looks like if it happens, I can get a 34 or 36 page comic-book-style (saddle-stitch) full color printing without too much trouble. Unfortunately, unlike Directionless, Medieval Mayhem was put together at web resolution, so the DPI isn't as high as I'd like for printing, but there's not too much I can do about that.

I was thinking of pricing them at $5 a piece, and I'm very interested in how many people would be interested in one at that price. (Yes, obviously people who express interest to me early could get signed copies.... for whatever that's worth... which is probably nothing. Meh.)


So that's where things stand with me and webcomics. There's a lot coming up, so stay tuned!