Two weeks ago I noted that someone had recently tried to get into my WordPress server. My firewall traced the query back to an IP in China, though I don’t have the ability to figure out where it originated from initially. I linked it to news of escalating activity from abroad; it seems that attempts to get into academic networks are sharply on the rise.

Then a week ago my server collapsed under what seemed to be a DDOS attack. I tried to restart it several times, but everytime I got the server back up it was swamped with traffic. I’ve spent a good eight hours now launching a new server and migrating over content from a backup. Most of my posts are back, but I lost the last year’s worth of images. I’ve only been able to recreate or restore about half.

It’s all kind of creepy. And it may be beyond my capacity to try and stay on top of escalating security problems on a private blog. Apparently there’s a botnet that’s been hacking WordPress servers generally for the last several months. I like having my own site; I like the ability to post whatever content I want and try out different kinds of server technologies; my Omeka-based class last year depended on this capacity. But the bar is getting higher.