Bill Steiner System Hacked

I found this on "Stamp Albums Web" under corrections:
Quote: "No corrections this month. My system got hacked and I lost all the corrections information. If you submitted corrections, please resubmit them for next month."

This made me wonder why someone would do this and for what gain?

Could malware be now lurking in the Steiner pages?

What can we all do to protect our selves?

Yes, PDF files can contain malicious software. Of course the issue with any kind of malicious software is that most anti-virus (AV) manufacturers are playing 'catch up'. In other words, the malicious software morphs/changes so that it cannot be detected; the AV software does not recognize this and it leaves everyone exposed for the period of time it takes to for the AV software to catch up.

The best defense is to use an AV app which updates frequently (or a real-time AV service). Another approach would be to use a reputable online file scanner for any suspect PDF files before opening them, for example https://virusdesk.kaspersky.com/.
Don

The website of the Polish Union Of Philatelists was hacked a couple of years ago. Nobody came up with an explanation as to why although there were rumours "it was the Chinese".

Have seen on the news in the past week that Kaspersky may have some issues. Something about several federal government agencies using Kaspersky software and some people thinking the software could be used as an entry into sensitive material.

I have Webroot Secure Anywhere screening software on my iMac.

I hope he has a better backup system.

Sounds from the note like his personal computer got hacked, not his website.

My comment would apply to either but assume if the web is hacked he would have it locally. If the local was lost for any reason, there would be a back up of that.

For a developer, there typically is no difference between their personal computer and the server.

In other words if I develop a PDF file on my personal computer and it is infected, then upload the file to the web server, the malware travels with the PDF file. It is unlikely that the server AV would be checking every uploaded file at time of upload (but the server AV software might catch it during its normal scan schedule).
Don

I mention this in other places on this Chat board ,It would be wise to purchase Bill's hard copy of his CD and keep it at home . I think it is so worth it at his price that I am afraid if something happens to him or he decides to sell out ,the next owner may raise the price to a level that they sell complete albums and that is a few hundred percentage higher than Bill's price . Matter in fact I think I have been purchasing a newer copy every 3 years ,yes it is cheap enough to have a extra updated copy .

Floortrader.

I definitely agree with you!

Of course you need the CD, it's too much time consuming selecting the files to download.

I too agree with floortrader. In addition, because disks do degrade and eventually fail, I suggest saving the files to an external hard drive and some sort of offsite storage. You want both to protect against a common-cause failure (e.g., house fire).

For me, I keep a copies on my local NAS and up on Google Drive (with a local copy on an SSD in my PC). And as my trust in Google is starting to wear thin, I also keep a back-up with a cloud storage service.

I still have the old Steiner pages in Pagemaker format, look at the date of the files; 17 years

I have the Page Maker files from 2003 but did not use Page Maker much so never adapted them.

From a development perspective, having the old files is of limited value after the years pass by; there are many dependencies including things like fonts, compilers, apps, and even the operating system.

When you have income, jobs, and a lot at stake relying upon developing software there is only one way to archive the original development environment. You preserve the entire computer as the archive, the operating system, the drivers, the compilers, the entire thing. I used to think that just preserving the hard drives was enough. I would archive the drives by pulling them and replacing them on each software engineers computer at the end of each development project. But I found that this was false economy, it was far better to simply buy new computers.

Computers are a tangled web of dependencies; and if you need to address some serious issues it is far better to go pull an archive computer off the shelf and pick up EXACTLY where the development was done. Trying to reconstruct the development environment from backups and old hard drives was never cost effective or time efficient. And even if you do successfully restore a 10-15 old development environment, you still have significant questions and 'unknowns' to deal with.
Don