We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com)! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!
We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com)! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!
On Thursday night, last week, we suffered an unusually effective series of attacks from Chinese hackers against our database server that have brought our database and our CagleCartoons.com download site down, along with our PoliticalCartoons.com store site.
Chinese hackers, looking over my shoulder.
On Friday, my valiant editors Brian and Stacey Fairrington, answered over 250 calls and emails from editors to give them the new, emergency, interim Google Drive cartoon download location where we set up a temporary download site for the recent cartoons. Our new columns are available on Cagle.com, see them on the front page at the right. (If you’re a client who needs access to the interim Google Drive site to download the recent cartoons, email [email protected] and we’ll give you the link.)
Our cartoonists should email new cartoons to us at [email protected], which goes to all of us; we will manually add your cartoons to the Google Drive interim download site and we will be sending new cartoons out to the editors who take email delivery through MailChimp until we have a new CagleCartoons.com back up with a new database and server. We’re updating Cagle.com manually for now, so it may be slow to display new cartoons. Payments to the cartoonists who get paid quarterly went out a couple of weeks ago, and the royalty checks for the monthly cartoonists went out this weekend, for January. Don’t worry, the cartoonists have all been paid!
The Chinese hackers, who leave lots of Chinese language files and malware on our database server every time they break in, have been watching as we repair the server and they come back each time repairs are made to tear the server down again. We’ve tried but we can’t keep them out of our outdated system. The hackers win this round. We had to give up on the old server and we’re scrambling to re-write our management system to work with a current SQL server.
Regular readers know how we’ve had continuing problems with hackers attacking Cagle.com, mostly with DDos/denial of service attacks. Thanks to the generosity of Cloudflare, we’re fending off the DDos attacks. The current problem is that we were using an older database and server for our CagleCartoons.com syndicate site and PoliticalCartoons.com store site, which left us vulnerable. We were too complacent, since the attacks were all against Cagle.com in the past. Our old database system worked so well that I hated the prospect of the cost and hassle of recreating it with newer, more defensible code. I procrastinated too long.
We don’t keep confidential information online. No credit card information was stolen.
The editors have all been lovely about this and we haven’t gotten any complaints – at least not so far. It has been nice to see the support and goodwill from our subscription clients at a time when they could justifiably be grouchy.
I also appreciate the heroic efforts of our staff, Theo, Brian, Stacey and Rob, who have really stepped up this weekend to make things work through our database crisis.
I hate inconveniencing everyone. Thanks for your patience with this mess! We hope to have new versions of the CagleCartoons.com and PoliticalCartoons.com sites up soon.
Perhaps I’ve been drawing too many cartoons of Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh.
The Sony Pictures hacker attack and the cowardly withdrawal of “The Interview” movie has been dominating the cartoons. I drew two!
A universal truth about evil dictators is that they have no sense of humor, so I suggest we mock the despots mercilessly. In fact, mocking mercilessly is really the only tool in my cartoonist tool belt – you know, if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
My second cartoon was quite popular on Facebook, featuring Kim Jong Un and the entertainment industry chickens. This one reminded me of my old Muppet days drawing Gonzo’s girlfriend, Camilla and all her chicken friends.
Today we got the news that North Korea’s internet service went down. Not much of a surprise – and probaby only a dozen people in North Korea have access to the internet – still interesting. North Korea makes a target of itself, which reminds me of a favorite Kim Jong Un oldie I drew below, which I should take out of mothballs.
Sorry to neglect the blog! I’ve been away on two cartoonist convention trips and I need to catch up! Here’s the new one today on Hong Kong.
Most people will see this in newspapers in black and white – and I think it is better in black and white.
I drew this as a riff on an oldie. I have lots of problems with Chinese hackers attacking my web sites, and I drew this self-portrait some time ago. I don’t think it got reprinted much, because it was a personal cartoon – better as a Hong Kong cartoon.
Here are a couple of recent cartoons that I forgot to post in the blog. Here’s Obama transforming into George W. Bush. I’m a little late on this one; I should have drawn it a couple of years ago. It probably wouldn’t have been reprinted much two years ago. Now that’s we’re back in Iraq, more and more, the transformation is clear.
The media’s march to war also matches the old march to war in Iraq under George W. Bush. People don’t seem to get that every party that is fighting over there is a bad guy, and bad guys fighting other bad guys is something we should leave alone. We have our priorities out of place, which is the point of the carton below.
The new smart watch from Apple looks pretty cool, but the emphasis on counting steps and the anal focus on health apps seems unpleasant. Here’s my take on it.
While I was away at the cartoonists convention in France for two weeks, I re-posted an oldie. This “evergreen” dove-bomber cartoon is appropriate all too often.
Here’s another one I missed – another riff on Obama and his pen annoying the Republicans. That’s the last one. Now I’m caught up!
Yes, that’s me, with China looking over my shoulder. Most of our hacker attacks come from China.
Our Cagle.com site was down yesterday afternoon with a massive “DDoS Zombie” hacker attack. I’m not sure where they came from this time, but in the past we’ve traced them to China. I drew this cartoon with China looking over my shoulder, at the time of an earlier attack. A “zombie” attack, like the one we suffered yesterday, is one that uses multiple automated scripts; a DDoS is a “distributed denial of service” attack which attempts to flood the server with requests in order to deny it’s ability to serve content or interrupt service. Yesterday we suffered a huge flood of automated zombie requests.
Cagle.com is blocked by the government of Iran, and I’m sure we have some enemies around the world, but I think the attacks we continue to suffer come from criminals. We’ve had hackers insert malware/viruses onto Cagle.com, and we’ve been pretty good about getting that down as soon as it goes up – still, it is jarring. Most often I think the attacks are fishing for ways in to our server, to search for any information, like credit card numbers, that have some value to the worldly crooks.
Just so that all of you hackers out there know, we don’t keep credit card information online. When we have repeating charges for syndicate subscribers, we write the credit card information on a piece of paper, with a pen, and enter it manually into Paypal each month. We don’t store the credit information anywhere digitally. When hackers attack us, all they will find are our cartoons, that are already on display on the Web.
