by William Skink
For those hoping that their choice for president wasn’t going to be between a neoconservative and Donald Trump, last night’s New York primary was, though expected, still depressing. A lot can happen, like an alien intervention or a giant sinkhole that swallows all of DC so we can just start over, but barring some spectacular set of unlikely events, it’s gonna be either Hillary or The Donald. Gross.
To lighten the mooood, I’d like to welcome Cowgirl to the conspiracy fringe where paranoia blossoms like weeds–genetically modified Monsanto weeds that may or may not put mind-controlling spores into the atmosphere. What the hell am I talking about? It would appear the Cowgirl site suffered a malware attack that may or may not be an attempt by Gianforte to silent the important progressive “news” Cowgirl reports on. Here is one of the hilarious comments from Cowgirl’s moderator, Mt Temperance:
We caught the hackers as they were testing the waters here. they certainly didn’t get too far…..
It seemed the only reason for the attack was to shut us down, and keep our readers from viewing our site.
While I did find Malware code to re-direct our viewers to porn and pill sites, I did not encounter any viruses or malware structures that could harm our readers….. just Cowgirl’s site. The codes were stripped and defenses put in place. We rescanned our site and it is now certified as clean by Surcui and Google Folks, so you’re good to comment at your leisure.
Thank you to our concerned readers for tipping us off! you guys rock!
This was all probably because of our opinions and real news gathering as progressives in this election year…….
I am sure there are some conservatives somewhere, who are not very happy at this time.
Are Republicans paying hackers to attack Cowgirl with malware because of the “real news” that is reported there? Anything is possible, I guess. More than likely this attack isn’t anything special, but kudos to Cowgirl for not letting an opportunity to play the victim pass without taking advantage of it. Gullible commenters quickly took up the conspiracy theory, claiming only rich Republicans have the resources to attack partisan gossip sites like Cowgirl:
Richard Miller: Who else has the power to do such a thing other than the “Double G” that is trying to lie his way into the Governors office.
Norma Duffy: Or the Money for that matter.
Hiring a Black Hat costs money, something only our millionaire republicans who want to takeover the state have.
Too funny. I guess oligarchs like the Pritzker clan don’t exist, or if they do (they do), they would never stoop to the tactics those nefarious Republicans are being accused of (without evidence, mind you). For more on the Pritzkers, Consortium News has a new piece, titled Bowing to America’s Oligarchs worth checking out (h/t JC).
Playing the victim here keeps the narrative of rich Republicans being big meanies alive for the Dem party faithful. But that other narrative of Democrat corruption keeps getting legs, with Ochenski taking it on in his column this week (sorry, no link).
At Cowgirl, there was one commenter who suggested not getting paranoid regarding this attack. That comment, and the response from Temperance, is just priceless:
IT Professional: Lets not get paranoid – wordpress sites are scanning continuously by bots trying to find vulnerabilities. Getting one hacked to redirect to a porn site is not uncommon. Not being critical of the platform used for the blog – it is just the nature of the framework
Mt. Temperance: No one here has gotten paranoid. This was a specific hack.
Let’s be specific shall we. It is our duty to report our news to our viewers cleanly. And it is important to keep them safe in the process. The word-press site wasn’t hacked, the domain was. Nothing else to see here….. move along!
Yeah, nothing else to see here. Thanks for the laughs, Cowgirl.