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Hacked. A Short Story

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Re: Hacked. A Short Story

#4
What's really important is that you never should keep a compromised system like this running, even if you think you found all modifications the attacker did. You probably didn't. So save your configs and set this machine up from scratch.

Re: Hacked. A Short Story

#5
post #4

What's really important is that you never should keep a compromised system like this running, even if you think you found all modifications the attacker did. You probably didn't. So save your configs and set this machine up from scratch.

I was gonna say much the same thing. Once a machine has been compromised, you've got to format and re-image it. The machine in the article could well still have a rootkit installed. Not to mention he doesn't seem to know the initial attack vector, so any security updates are meaningless if someones credentials have been stolen.

Finally, if you're really paranoid, you also have to flash the bios in the machine too as there are rootkits that can potentially survive formatting...

Re: Hacked. A Short Story

#6
post #4

What's really important is that you never should keep a compromised system like this running, even if you think you found all modifications the attacker did. You probably didn't. So save your configs and set this machine up from scratch.

Definitely. Also, I don't know anything about their relations, but if this is a client machine, first thing to do would be to contact the client telling him that his box is compromised and if he wants me to investigate. Otherwise, from a non-technical person view, the whole (awesome) story looks like somebody attempted to do something with e-mails and he failed.

Re: Hacked. A Short Story

#9
post #2

Stories like this is what makes me believe immutable infrastructure is the future.

Exactly. Does your business model care if your server is running apache or nginx? No? Then why the hell isn't that automated, baked, and tamper-proofed? We'll know we've arrived when the only feasible attack is sneaking malicious code into a git repo and hoping no one notices.

Re: Hacked. A Short Story

#10
post #4

What's really important is that you never should keep a compromised system like this running, even if you think you found all modifications the attacker did. You probably didn't. So save your configs and set this machine up from scratch.

Until you restore from backup: then you probably have a compromised system again.
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