Today, a monday of all days, was not one of my best days.
First of all, a server got hacked some time ago which we found out this weekend. Luckilly the server was not in a location to compromise more of our network. Even more so, the machine was turned off this weekend by a co-worker to prevent more damage. It also meant the hacker(s) had no time to clean up, so we might have some info on other hacked machines and give a warning. Maybe we can even get some of the gnat-like script kiddies that were ‘visiting’ the machine.
This was probably the best part of the day.
You could say I wasted most of the rest of the day working on one of those rare instances where even in the face of cold logic computers can be dodgy bastards. A routine task of configuring a load-balancing configuration completely struck a wall because… well… I still don’t know why it won’t work. Even with identical settings I cannot get the bloody loadbalancer to start doing it’s job.
Problems like this annoy me greatly. I love the fact that computers, even when seemingly erratic, act according to logic, thus relatively predictable. But when a similar setup shows completely different behavior it really starts to eat at me. I can’t put my finger on it, but problems like this just twist my nipples.Â
Ah well, tomorrow another day. Google will be my friend. I will succeed.
I never got how people just randomly “hack” machines – I was under the assumption that you had to run specific exploits on services/programs running on that machine, like a webserver, a mailserver etc etc.
I mean, people love to say that XP is insecure, but if you gave the IP of a fully patched (unfirewalled) XP machine with no-default passwords to a group of experienced hackers, could they realistically do anything?
The weakest link is always the human one, regardless of the Operating System. Anyone that claims an OS is secure is speaking with a forked tongue. 😛