December 2, 2008 I published the first blog post, A low intensity, distributed bruteforce attempt, summarizing those findings. The post ended up slashdotted.
That brought
more disbelief, but also
confirmation that others were seeing the same thing, and that the first occurences may have been seen up to a year earlier (November-ish 2007).
The slow bruteforcers were not getting in, so I just went on collecting data. I estimated they'd be going on well past new year's if they were going to reach the end of the alphabet.