Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time enjoying the Darknet Diaries podcast and it’s compelled me to finally share the entire story of the most intense year of my 20 year professional career. I was the sole developer hired by a company going through a circus-like ownership transition while criminals actively worked to defraud the 300,000 users of this 14 year old, high end marketplace.
We experienced late nights, numerous technical challenges, worked with abuse response teams, learned a lot of lessons about phishing and fraud, high emotions, death threats and at least one person lost a business that depended on the site. Here’s the story from start to finish, including how to prevent many of these problems on your own site. Buckle up.
SSH::Batch is a simple command line tool, written in Perl, that allows you to run shell commands over SSH across multiple servers. These days it seems most people turn to Puppet / Chef / Ansible for that type of thing, but sometimes your needs aren't that complicated. For that, SSH::Batch fills the gap nicely and it's really simple to get started.