GYRO CLUB OF SHERWOOD PARK

Our sincere condolences are extended to Eleanor Copeland and family on the passing of her father Charles Percy (Chuck)Edwards, August 16, 2016.

Congratulation to Rusty, Peter, and Keith for a great fun golf tournament yesterday at the Belvedere Golf Club. There were 28 Gyro’s there to enjoy the day. Trophy’s were taken home by Jack Beattie and Rick Craddock for low gross and low net respectively. Keith did a good job of distributing the prizes and I especially enjoyed how he did the draw for the extra cash by convincing us to add more cash to the prize. I’m thinking lucky Bernie Kropp and Larry Klaus who went home with extra cash in their pockets.

On June 18th 75 Gyros and Gyrettes gathered at the AJ Ottwell Arts Centre on
Broadmoor Boulevard to officially end our Gyro year and to install our 2016-2017
executive.
We were honoured with the presence of our District V111 Past Governor Al Pentney and
his wife Tara. Al and Tara live in Calgary and made the trip north specifically to do our
executive installation.
After a Roast Beef Buffet we were pleased to install Glen Hillier as our newest member;
welcome to Gyro Glen.
The Presidents Pin was presented to Art Merrick and the Past Presidents Pin to Bill
Austin.
George Ward was installed as a new Director, our other incoming Director is Paul West.
Paul was not able to join us so on this evening so will be officially installed at a later
date.
Continuing as second year Directors are Dorn Hunt and Dick Caddey.
Installed as incoming Vice President is Ken Lesniak.
Bernie Kropp and Jim Malott were given 25 year pins in honour of being members of
our club for 25 years.
John Williams has agreed to stay on as Secretary and Eric Braun as Treasurer, Scott
Brisbin will continue as Bulletin Editor.
A big thank you to Al Pentney and Tara for helping make this a very enjoyable evening.

I received this from Scott this morning.

Calli seems to be recovering well, getting better and sharper every day. Looking at the Jeep again, I now believe in miracles.

I received the following email from our bulletin editor Scott Brisbin this morning.

Calli was in a nasty car crash in Quebec on Sat. and although she miraculously crawled out without a scratch after hitting a power pole and rolling over an embankment down into a ravine, she has very little short term memory yet and I am concerned about a possible CBI even thought the hospital discharged her. Info is not easy to get from the Quebec health café system.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the Brisbin family this morning.

Have you ever watched one of the cyber crime tv shows such as CSI:Cyber or Scorpion and wondered how much of it is fact and how much is fiction?

Since Monday January 11, 2016 our Sherwood Park Gyro Club website — www.spgyro.org — has been under what is termed a “Password Guessing Brute Force Attack”. There have been 43 unsuccessful attempts to guess the password and logon to our website. Thanks to the information provided by Sucuri Alert, the security firm that the Club hired to monitor our website after being hacked back in October of 2015, we know the IP address used in each attempt. (An IP address is the internet world’s equivalent of a telephone number.) And, we know the userid that they attempted to logon to.

Using tools freely available on the internet, I have been able to determine that all but 1 of the 43 attempts originated in Russia. The one that didn’t was from Indonesia. In fact, we can trace the exact location of each attempt, eg.

was the location of one such attempt which took place at 11:12 PM on January 13, 2016.

When I was in high school we were taught the 5 W’s of good journalism — Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. We now know what (unsuccessful logon attempts), where the attempts are originating from (locations in Russia centring around Moscow) and when (starting January 11 @ 11:49 PM) the attempts were made. What we don’t know is who or why.

Was it the KBG wanting to spy on the Sherwood Park Gyro Club? Not likely, I think they have more important things to do. Was it some lonely Russian teenage nerd camped in his bedroom looking for attention. Based on the number of different locations where the attempts originated from, not likely. Some of the attempts have originated from what we would consider the equivalent of our internet cafes or McDonald’s free wifi hotspots.

My guess, again; based on the locations where the attempts have originated from, is that it is a group of young Russian university students either working on a computer security class assignment (highly unlikely) or much more likely that same group of likely male students have a bet on as to who can “hack” in to the largest number of websites in a given period of time.

Why is all of this of concern to the Sherwood Park Gyro Club? The last time the Club website was hacked back in October of 2015, there was an attempt to install a “redirect” on the website.A redirect is used to redirect someone to a location other than that which is shown usually for nefarious reasons such as phishing (phishing is form of fraud where a user is “redirected” to a website where the user is duped into revealing personal or confidential information which can then be used for illegitimate purposes.) To prevent this from happening again, the Club hired Sucuri Alert to monitor our website 24/7/365.

What is our next step in this cyber chess game? Sucuri Alert is in the process of installing a “cloud firewall” on the site which will block all access attempts from Russia. Hopefully this will result in “checkmate” and I will be able to get some sleep.

Thanks President Bill, you and Norma did an excellent job of the evening, the poinsettias were a nice touch and a welcomed gift for those that were able to take the one home from their table. It was good to see so many Gyro’s and their spouses out for the evening. Congadulation’s to Earl Korber for winning the tax receipt for the Christmas Bureau donations. Thanks to Al Bleiken for his diligent work to get the contributions up to $700.

Cheers Ray

Fellow Gyros and Gyrettes

They say it is the season to be jolly, and your generous and kind contributions to the Christmas Bureau, will help make a lot of families in Strathcona a little happier this Christmas. When rounded out by yours truly, the total contribution to the Christmas Bureau is $700.00 from our club. I think we can enjoy our Christmases just a little more, by knowing we have helped those less fortunate than ourselves, to enjoy their Christmases a little more as well. I promise to be less rigorous as the Sergeant at Arms and will limit my fines to a maximum of $2.00 next year. My apologies for being a little ruthless at the end of this year. Please accept my thanks, and may you all have a wonderful Christmas and a healthy, happy, and prosperous New Year.

Sheriff Allan

Congratulations to Bill Austin & team for finishing second in the “A” Event at Gyro District VIII Curl-a-rama this past weekend. For a list of all the event winners check the Gyro District VIII website.

Note from Lloyd

Since there were only a few of us there it fell on Bill, Art and myself to win something in the Texas hold-em. Unfortunately for Bill he got 3 rd in the A side while I won the B ( 80 bucks ) and Art came second. Our Sh. Pk. team skipped by Bill (Lloyd, Jim, and Terry) came second in the A draw and so we won prizes. Since there where 5 curlers from our club Art played for Edmonton Club and they also got prizes. Turned out to be a fun event and most importantly the roads were good. Just as a footnote had our skip made one very important take out ( missed counting 4 ) we probably would have won however as you can see it doesn’t bother me — much !!!

Lloyd