Damned Hackers
About thirty minutes ago, I was just happily surfing the internet, when suddenly there came a knock on the door… Well, actually, Firefox ( 1.0.5 Beta ) crashed on me, and sent my whole world to hell. When I tried to restart Firefox, its memory usage hit the roof and forced me to reboot. ( Firefox is not good for high uptimes ). Upon rebooting, I su’ed to root and vi’ed my system log. ( /var/log/messages ). Hoping to find something interesting, I quickly skipped down to June. I was expecting to find something interesting on June 24th, but I found something very interesting before I even got there. June 16thwas a Thursday. I clearly remember coming home and trying to use my computer, which seemed sluggish and dead. I never bothered to look into the matter. My SSH server was still up from the previous day at that point. When I was looking through the log today, I found hundreds of failed login attempts spread accross three ip addresses, each of which seems to have led one ‘attack’—clearly a brute force hacking attempt. I am, of course, too good to have my root password brute force hacked. I am also smart enought to password protect my other accounts. All of the attempts failed, but I am still quite annoyed. I am led to wonder if it was someone I know, or if it was just some n00b who scanned an ip address range for open ports and found port 22 open on my ip. A log of all relevant messages ( I wrote a script to extract them ) can be found here.