

I've been hacked :( - jacquesm

I'm ashamed to admit it but one of my machines was hacked. It was a media server running an older linux distro, I more or less forgot that box was still up and running in a house that is up for sale. Last week when I went there to turn up the heat so the pipes wouldn't freeze I noticed I couldn't use the machine to check up on some websites. I figured it had crashed and brought it back down south with me to have a look at what the cause was.<p>So, the cause was pretty simple, someone managed to get in through my not-so-carefully concealed backdoor, how they managed to crack a 20 digit root pw is something I'll never know.<p>Lesson learned, even old and rarely used systems need to be kept secure and up-to-date, the box was sitting on a 10 Mbit adsl line, most likely it was used for some not so nice purposes.
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slater
if it was an older linux distro, they probably DIDN'T crack your 20-digit root
pw, rather exploiting a bug somewhere else?

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cperciva
I hope you had good backups. :-)

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volida
hey there. This is totally irrelevant but i wanted το know how you manage το
be so active on HN. Did you take any breaks i missed?

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cperciva
My activity level varies. Some weeks I don't make a single comment.

Right now I'm relatively active due to (a) having released a new version of
Tarsnap yesterday, and (b) not wanting to start anything major until after
Christmas.

