Thursday, July 28, 2016

FreeDNS / NameCheap DNS Servers Attacked / Hacked? Are your domain suddenly directed to 213.184.126.163 ?

UPDATE: following email correspondence with the hosting provider for the IP 213.184.126.163 they have taken down the server there till further notice. At least now users won't be redirected to phishing and malware websites.

Today we were alarmed to find out that our server domains are not resolved properly to their correct IP address but to an IP address we're not familiar with 213.184.126.163

The reason for this issue was that FreeDNS servers have responded with the wrong IP 213.184.126.163 instead of our real IP. To some people, this wrong IP cause a redirect to a malware website! Please comment here if you suffer from a similar issue.

While it seems that, at least in our case FreeDNS now responds properly, the malicious DNS entry has gotten a TTL (Time To Live) of 1 week which means that if the various domain name servers who received the wrong IP are actually obeying this TTL your website may be inaccessible for an entire week!

To check if your domain is resolved properly, you can use a service such as digwebinterface or whatsmydns to check quickly how different DNS worldwide resolve your domain. You can also use dig or nslookup to see quickly what a specific DNS replies.

In a chat with NameCheap they denied being hacked as their support supervisor wrote "I can assure you that our servers have not been hacked.". Well, if not hacked, have they done this on purpose? Getting many of their domains to point to a malware site? Do you smell a lawsuit coming?

Here's a bit of info about the IP used for this hack:

IP Address13.14.166
CityNess Ziona
State/RegionHaMerkaz
Country CodeIL
ISPNet-Style Atarim Ltd

 As for our own website I've posted this message on our forum: http://colnect.com/en/forum/viewtopic!f=6&t=68917&p=192078#p192078

Dear members,

UPDATE: we have posted on our blog about this issue as well.
UPDATE2: if you're on windows try to also launch ipconfig /flushdns from command prompt to ensure your computer is trying to fetch the correct DNS.
UPDATE3: we've updated more entries to the hosts file to ensure all our servers respond properly.


PLEASE SAVE THIS MESSAGE IF YOU SEE IT. If other Colnectors are having trouble please assist them.

DNS is a service that translates a domain name ( such as colnect.com ) to an IP address ( such as 148.251.247.10 which is our main IP ).
One of our DNS providers had problems on their servers. I suspect they've been hacked but are unaware of it. Thereby you may not see Colnect properly and instead get redirected somewhere else.

If this happens you can here are your options:

1/ Close your browser, wait a bit and try again. If it doesn't work then go ahead and flush your DNS cache. However, if your DNS provider didn't get updated yet you may need to follow the next steps.

2/ Update your hosts file manually (explanation) by adding these two lines:

148.251.247.10 colnect.com
148.251.247.9 s.colnect.net
148.251.247.9 i.colnect.net
148.251.247.11 nif.colnect.net


If you choose this option you may want to comment out these lines later as we plan to change IP for colnect.com in the coming days as we upgrade our server.

3/ Set your DNS servers to Google's own 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 - here's a guide


We are very sorry for this trouble. While their DNS now seems to work well, the bad records showing a different IP address might still be cached on other DNS providers.

Sunday, May 22, 2016

Accelerated Growth - 131313 Members Now on Colnect

The Colnect community, ever growing, has now reached 131,313 Members!



To take a quick look back at the way we have come, as a community, we need to go back to August 2009, when we celebrated our first milestone of 5,555 members. From there the community almost doubled in 8 month's time to - 11,111. The community just kept doubling its previous milestone, getting to 20,020, than going to 33,33340,00450,50566,66670,707 until reaching the beautifully round number of 100,000 almost exactly a year ago.
"100 Złotych (Władysław I Lokietek (1320-1333))" Poland Coin, from the Colnect catalog

Important thing to note, that the rate of growth in our community in the past 2 years has tripled (!) from the rate of growth in the preceding years.
"Barbara Virgin and Martyr" Italy Holy Card, from the Colnect catalog
33,333 members have joined Colnect in the past year, to form our current community of collectors from 150 countries around the world. This means that the amount of collectors joining this year is six times larger than our entire community at the first milestone!

"Parque Generalísimo Francisco de Miranda" Venezuela Admission Ticket, from the Colnect catalog
More members, means more collectors, means more collections! In a very fitting number, over 33,333,333 inventory items have been added to Colnect since the last milestone of 110,000,000 inventory items. Inventory items are any item that a member adds to their collection, swap and wish lists.

"Icon of Holy Annunciation" Macedonia Postcard, from the Colnect catalog
As the community develops, so does Colnect as a collection management tool and a website to connect collectors. The past year we've seen Colnect dawn a sleek new outfit, added with dynamic sorting, was joined by 2 new categories, Admission Tickets and Holy Cards and much more.

"Yugoslavia Vs. Indonesia" Yugoslavia Admission Ticket, from the Colnect catalog
We would like to thank the over 900 contributors that make Colnect the effective tool it is today. The contributors help make the catalogs as complete, accurate and interesting as possible, and are doing great, dedicated work, on their own time, for the benefit of all collectors.

"10th Anniversary of the Admission of Angola in the UN" Angola Stamp, from the Colnect catalog
Want to join as a contributor on Colnect? Learn more about what you can do to help on the Contributor Guide. You are also welcome to check out and join our efforts to complete the catalog with ALL images on the Zero Missing Pictures Campaign.

"National bank in Skopje" Yugoslavia Postcard, from the Colnect catalog
We're excited about Colnect getting a larger and larger collector's community, providing more opportunities for each collector, improved tools of use, better collecting and better connecting. We wish all Colnect collectors to have a thriving and fulfilling collecting year.

""Agatha Virgin and Martyr" Italy Holy Card, from the Colnect catalog

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Over 80008 Tea Bags on the Colnect catalog!

As is becoming a yearly tradition, we are now celebrating a new milestone for the Tea Bags catalog, surpassing 80,008 Tea Bags. In a perfect succession we have previously celebrated 70,070 tea bags in 2015 and 60,006 tea bags in 2014.

"Thank god..." Netherlands Tea Bag, from the Colnect catalog
This year over 10,000 unique new tea bags have been added to the catalog. The leading countries, by numbers, remain Germany, USA, UK and the Netherlands. At the same time, we've had new countries joining this year with their first representing tea bag, such as Mali and Kuwait.

"Calmer Chameleon Infusion" UK Tea Bag, from the Colnect cataog
The catalog's growth is meticulously and carefully conducted by the wonderful coordinator, Carine De Pauw [crookscarine]. The coordinator's dedicated work and high standards resulted in this perfectly cohesive, beautiful and comfortable catalog. You can read more about the Tea Bags coordinator in a short interview we had with her in 2011.

"Earl Grey Tea Blend" Netherlands Tea Bag, from the Colnect catalog
In April 2013, crookscarine has also created the Tea Labels catalog, that matches the Tea Bags catalog. This catalog is also now rapidly growing and already contains over 4000 tea labels.

"High Quality Sencha Tea Bag" Japan Tea Bag, from the Colnect catalog
We would like to thank the Tea Bags coordinator and the great contributors, for the excellent effort they have made to bring this catalog to its current vision.

"Senne Oczka" Poland Tea Bag, from the Colnect catalog
Would like to join as a contributor on the Tea Bags catalog? Learn more here how you can help. Want to help on Colnect in some other way? Please read the Contributor Guide for more information.

"Premium Ceylon Tea Irish Breakfast" USA Tea Bag, from the Colnect catalog



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