No, that’s not the Ghost of Christmas Future in the picture today. That hooded AI villain is supposed to represent a cyber-attack!
MrFireStation seems to have been attacked last week over Thanksgiving. Helpful reader and Doberman-like guard dog, Klaus Wentzel, noticed last week that his comments have been blocked. I found them in a “pending” bucket.
He wondered if website traffic had ground to a halt, but the opposite was true. Over 14K hits came in from China!
It’s not uncommon for me to see “hits” from China, but almost 95% of the visitors I get are from English-speaking countries. I’ve never seen thousands of visitors from China like this before.
The traffic was to almost all pages on the site. For some reason, the relatively off-topic Vintage Christmas Album Covers (!) was the most popular with almost 700 hits alone. Most posts had 25-40 visitors, but some had zero.
I couldn’t find anything nefarious going on with the site, but it seemed like it must be an attack of some kind. At Klaus’ urging, I changed all of the WordPress passwords and made them longer. Some of them hadn’t been updated in a few years.
This is the error message some people are getting from WordPress …
Please let me know if you get this post this morning and try to comment if you can! I’m hoping it’s just a blip of some sort, but might have to do more digging if this post gets crickets on Monday.
Image: Pixabay
MrFireStation 
Sorry to send you a vague “testing 1-2-3” but given the serious nature of what happened… sending some banality your way.
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Got it!
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I received your newsletter.
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Thanks!
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Hello Mr Fire Station, I received your post via email and am glad you survived the “attack!” Keep up the great work, I really do enjoy reading about your ER lifestyle, and find that it is inspiring my own plans to follow in your footsteps. Happy Holidays!
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Thanks, Ben – happy holidays to you, too!
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Got it
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Thanks for letting me know.! Some people are reporting error messages.
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I created a WordPress Account just for commenting on your site with the username klauswentzel. When I go to the site logged into WordPress, I get the discussion has been closed. This comment is from seldom used browser with the slightly changed username klaus_wentzel and without logging into WordPress.
WordPress could have either hacked, applied a bad patch or are being subjecting to a Denial of Service Attack which would explain the mystery traffic from China.
You might want to open a support ticket with WordPress. They seem to have something going on.
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So weird. I had two previous subscriptions under your name.
klauswentzel … Jul 21, 2022
XXXX_wentzel@yah…Dec 11, 2019
Maybe it’s something in the login. I’ve never contacted WordPress for anything before, but my old boss at MegaCorp sent me a screenshot of his problem, so I’ll try that next.
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