Serendipity35

Serendipity35 got hacked last week by some folks from China. That happened back in 2008 too and Tim wrote about it here. This time it produced a reaction from Google. We averaged about 92,000 hits a day this month, but on those days we shot up to 420,000. Google took note because we have a Google ad box on the right column. Well, we HAD one there. They disabled our account.

It's not like we really made any money off the site ads - we were hoping to produce enough to cover domain registration and some of Tim's expenses (he hosts this blog on his own server) and maybe burgers and beers once a year.

You can imagine the issue that come up at the really big blogs and websites that make their living off a site. We are not in that strata, but when hackers see a post like this one about personal video online that has more than 63,000 hits on it, they figure that's a good one for a spam comment attack.

This attack last week was more intrusive than spam commenting and links. Tim has to sort through the rubble (and maybe he will write about it later) but, according to Google they "found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we've decided to disable your account."