
Ask HN: Most interesting cyber attack that you faced in your career? - tompazourek
I spent most of today alleviating a cyber attack on one of the sites of our clients, which was attacked by a Chinese botnet to send spam emails. It was nothing extraordinarily clever and probably a result of some automated crawler looking for vulnerabilities.<p>But it was a very interesting thing to work on and resolve eventually. It got me thinking about other people&#x27;s experiences with cyber attacks. Some interesting stories and experiences to share?<p>What was the most interesting cyber attack that you dealt with in your career?
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pcunite
This one is not that interesting from a technical point of view, but it was
funny to me at the time. As best as I can recall …

It was 2003 and I was working on various test servers for a client. A new to
me (old junky box in truth) server was put in my office area. A few days later
people (only a couple of us there at a time) were complaining about the
internet speed and if I was having any issues. I didn't notice anything, yahoo
seemed to open up quick enough.

I was not a networking guy. However, I got to noticing a lot of traffic on the
network. People kept complaining about speed issues during the week. The
Internet was, now that I think about it, a little sloooowwww. That blinky nic
light on that server sure looks busy! Whoa!!! It is infected with the Code Red
II or Slammer/Saphire worm!

Opps!

Unplugged. Everything okay now.

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telebone_man
Pretty standard in the world of VoIP these days, really, but at the time I was
new to the technology and the feeling I got when 6 different call centers with
a combined 120 agents called me within 5 minutes to complain will always make
my stomache turn...

In short, about 10 years ago, I hosted slightly cumstomised instances of
something called ViciDial. It's call center software. I neglected to implement
DOS protection. And a botnet started trying to brute force REGISTERs to the
SIP service. It completely clogged up the measly 100Mb pipe I was renting out
of the data center.

I had no KVM. No remote reboot. No external firewall. Stupid, stupid - stupid!

I just sat there for 2 hours until they finally finished.

..ugh

