Blocking AzureCloud due to malicious traffic

I haven’t posted in a long time but I felt the need to mention this to anyone else who might need to consider it. There has been a significant uptick in malicious traffic to my website over the last few months and I decided to do some analysis of from where it is coming. A huge source of these probes (looking through logs there are hundreds and hundreds of 404s that seem to be looking for vulnerable software) are Microsoft IP addresses. Digging around, it turns out they seem to be Azure VPS instances. I opened tickets with Microsoft at https://cert.microsoft.com for several of these IP addresses but the tickets were closed within a minute with a generic response: “This report could not be validated, no action was taken.”

It seems others have had this same issue.

Since this is a personal website and I don’t really need to be concerned with corporate connectivity, I decided just to block the entire AzureCloud. You can conveniently download the list from here in JSON format. I blocked the AzureCloud network prefixes.

Good bye, Azure VPS.

Enable pf at startup on Apple macOS, SIP enabled

After searching for a way to enable the built in pf firewall at startup in High Sierra (I didn’t want to additionally enable the Application Firewall, just the packet filter piece) I found many posts that all mentioned disabling System Integrity Protection (SIP) and directly editing the default launchd file:

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Test shot from Ulysses

I was wondering how well Ulysses could interact with WordPress so this is a simple test.

Chuck roast with carrots, new potatoes

Penny made pot roast. yum, yum!

Yosemite and Apple Mail

This fixed a huge issue I had with Apple mail:

Edit: Apparently the author is going through an existential crisis of some sort and has removed the post; the long and short of it was to disable (uncheck) the setting for “Automatically detect and maintain settings”.

http://meandmymac.net/2014/10/trouble-with-yosemite-mail/

Awesome Oktober

Oh my! This is the best Oktoberfest I’ve ever tried. Definitely gets a thumbs up!

Microsoft, are you freaking kidding me?

And this is why I sometimes really get frustrated with Microsoft Windows.

Sandy is a dandy

Been looking for a good alternative to the sweet Oktoberfests I’ve been drinking as of late and this one is great!

Thanks to Mother’s Brewing.