Willie Crawford Teaches REAL Internet Marketing  

After noticing my dedicated server slowed to
a crawl, and frequently timing out, I did some
digging around.

Tom Brownsword, resident security expert and
leading member of The Internet Marketing Inner
Circle, shared in an interview that we did that
you shouldn't leave unused scripts on your
server.

In looking at one of my databases, I noticed
that some fields had several MEGS of data...
for a program that I had never used. It's
was an installation of PHPBB (an older version)
that I started installing on one of my servers,
but never used the forum after setting it up.

The forum was at (an example)...
http://DomainName.com/forum/

So I guess that someone guessed the url, found
and registered for the forum, and then took
advantage of exploits in a script that they were
all-to-familiar with.

There were three registered users of this forum.
One had over 12,000 posts, one had over 10,000 posts,
and one had very few posts.

I clicked on the profile of the person with
12,000+ posts, saw a link to a website and
clicked on it. My firewall and anti-virus
programs both kicked in... informing me that they
had just protected my computer from an attack.

As I looked at the MySQL database for the
unused forum, there was over 10 GIG of data
there. Much of it was in the word search
category. There was several meg of data
in the comment and trackback tables.

I deleted the entire installation, and dropped
the tables from the database.

My server is running much faster now :-)

The moral of the story... listen to Tom when
he says don't leave "spare" scripts installed
on your computer. Too many "bad guys" are
searching for these scripts and know the holes.

The secondary point is that if you notice your
website (or computer) running slooowwww, you
might want to look for the cause. :-)

By the way, you can get the recorded interview
that Tom and I did on website security, computer
security, and the general security of your web
business at: http://www.tdbx.com/r/wc/call0108/

Willie