I sent an email to a monk in Nepal and my blog was hacked by the Chinese

Is is just me or was the authors transition from "How I got hacked by the Chinese" to "Here's some analysis of articles on Medium" kind of jolting?

I would have liked to see some analysis on the prevalence of these attacks on blogs instead.

> short but brutal DDoS

> blog was deluged with thousands of comments

> the target was the shared hard drive

It would be nice to know what the actual attack here was. Was it really a DDOS? Did they take advantage of an out-of-date version of Wordpress to get access to the hosting account and cause some actual damage? Or did they just post a lot of spam?

> The content left little doubt on the origin of the attack. I had sent an email to one of the most notorious opponents to the Chinese regime. It retaliated mercilessly.

Wait what?

Your blog becomes the target of common everyday run-of-the-mill comment spam, and you just immediately assume this is a State Sponsored attack? Please... you, and your blog are really not that important.

And we're supposed to just accept the Chinese government monitors all monk's email inboxes, and then launches attacks against anyone who dares email them? Ya right... If the Chinese government was going to go through that much hassle, why not just shut down or intercept/delete all inbound email coming to the monks? Or prevent the Monks from responding?

The much more plausible narrative is this blogger had an outdated Wordpress install, and some bots pwned his server in a completely unrelated scenario.

Checking his blog, he is indeed running an outdated Wordpress install (even after the attack!)[1].

[1] http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fmondaynote.com%2f

I'm confused ... the article starts with an account of the "hack" (although it seems to have actually been just comment spam) and then ends with a rant about WordPress and then a data analysis of the posts on Medium ... ?? ... am I missing something?

So basically the fact is, two weeks after the author sent an email to this monk, his blog got spammed by comments in Chinese.

And the conclusion is his blog was hacked by the Chinese. Maybe there are some correlation here but it seems too quick to jump to the conclusion that the email caused the Chinese government hacked your blog?

Maybe it is because of something you posted on your blog rather than the email?

Confusing piece. Not hacked, DDoS'd. Wordpress is bad for non-techies. Medium is drastically limiting the number of tags on articles.

Just to note that the "a monk" he emailed is one most well-known monks in the world, so I'm really unsurprised that his communications are being monitored. Certainly not close to fame as the Dalai Lama, but he's well known if you read even a little about meditation, tibetan buddhism, or the science of meditation.

Mattheiu Ricard has written a lot about the intersection of meditation and neuroscience, etc. Really fascinating stuff. Here's a TED talk he gave: https://www.ted.com/talks/matthieu_ricard_on_the_habits_of_h...

> For instance, adding a feature to perform a specific function means you will have the choice between literally thousands of plug-ins.

Therefore I prefer not having the option to add custom features.

What?

> It turned out to be the most costly email I ever sent to anyone.

Not 100% applicable, but worth thinking about IMHO:

One dissident in the Soviet Union, I think Joseph Brodsky, said not to talk about the abuses that oppressors inflict on you. You only magnify their impact: They do those things to scare and intimidate, and every time you repeat the story you help them do it again, to an ever wider audience (who themselves will repeat it). Let their attempts to terrify their victims die, without an echo, in the room where they occur.

It's hard to oppress hundreds of millions or billions of people; you can't really control them all if they don't submit. Terror is a tool for keeping them in line.

(In fairness, it doesn't necessarily apply to this situation, and sometimes talking about things helps people organize, find support, and alert the world to the abuses. But how many people who read this story will now hesitate to help a critic of the Chinese government?)

So are there accounts of state sponsored DDoS followed by cracks that have been managed/diverted on Medium or is the article just saying journalists should use infrastructure and not self-host?

> As a publisher, the experience made me realize the potential in a service like the one from Ev Williams’s Medium.

Is this an ad?

Him sending an email to the .np cctld has nothing to do with the hack he's talking about. More likely, his plain text email was intercepted 'on the wire' and would have been the same to whichever cctld he would have sent to.

>The content left little doubt on the origin of the attack.

That's quite a leap.

Do DDoS and comment spam count as hacking now?

Really? clickbait on hackers news? GREAT

Monks read email? A big part of Buddhism is getting rid of all materialism.