Web-Performance Blog
I used to have a YubiKey, but it never fully caught on with me. Now, finally, I want to start using a YubiKey to reduce the risk of phishing attacks and strengthen my overall personal IT security.
A hardware security token never goes alone; always add two. One is for use, and the second is for backup.
I used to always reach for DSL-reports for speed testing.
But I ran into issues where testing didn’t always work, and there are so many advertisements that I’m fed up. A nice, currently ad-free experience is with Cloudflare.
The BLP_bbot/0.1 user agent is associated with Bloomberg Financial Market and is referred to as “BLP” within their own internal naming conventions. It’s likely used by Bloomberg for web crawling purposes, potentially related to financial data aggregation and analysis.
I recently had a lot of contact with ASNs and I was looking for a full list of ASNs. There is an official and public list from RIPE.
https://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/asnames/asn.txt
This PowerShell script can be used to check the status of a plain list of web links that you have copied to your clipboard.
During a DDoS attack, I found a large amount of a HTTP request parameter “_sm_byp=” in my logs. However, this parameter is not native to my app.
_sm_byp=
Modified example:
https://www.example.com:443/manifest.json?_sm_byp=iVVt9H5dRMP8Lb3F
https://www.example.com:443/test.html?_sm_byp=iVVc8ZT1kQFvX6Nr
MyIP.is, a handy online tool designed to instantly provide users with their public IP address and additional related information.
One of the cool features of this website is that they are actively involved in managing larger pages, collecting and analyzing IP data, and then compiling a list of malicious players on the web, which is available for free download.
I started my journey into GitHub Co-Pilot this week. I was once interested in trying it but scrapped the idea due to the price and the inability to find the 90-day free offer anymore. However, now I have finally begun my journey. I started by installing the GitHub Co-Pilot plugin for Visual Studio Code.
ℹ️ This post is not a comprehensive story or tutorial. It’s more a documentation of thoughts and findings on my journey using GitHub Co-Pilot.
Working on a project, I needed to perform reverse DNS lookups of IP addresses in PHP. The native function gethostbyaddr() seems to be very slow. I managed to vastly improve the speed of the lookups by switching to dns_get_record().
gethostbyaddr($ip);
Even as a long-time listener of the daily newscast from SANS Storm Center, I never knew they offer a free API with useful information. The downside is that the API is rather slow, but still useful for IP intelligence.