Fear of hacking

Mon Sep 8 16:55:20 GMT 2003 Fear of hacking

Today some anonymous user posted a rather short message:

hacked by shooq

I suspect that this terse comment had something to do with the subject of that post rather than my website, but as I've had other rabid anti-Sco comments penned here I do sometimes worry that some overzealous and careless person is going to try to damage MY site to express their hatred of all things SCOish.

Anyone who reads here regularly knows that I'm no fan of this lawsuit, although I have tried to keep an open mind about it. My opinion is that this can do no good for anyone long term, whether or not there is any real justification for the action in the first place.

But the people who have spattered graffiti here aren't regular readers; it's the Usenet equivalent of a drive-by shooting. I'm wearing the wrong "colors", so to speak. But there has been no real damage. Graffiti, particularly internet graffiti, is easy enough to clean up, though an actual hacking attack might not be.

My logs are always peppered with the attempts of the script kiddies to break Formail and other well known holes. Who knows what other attempts have been made that I haven't noticed? This site runs on BSD, so I have more confidence in its security than I might otherwise. I don't run much in the way of add-on software either, but no site is immune to break in, so this is something I think about now and then. I've though several times of disabling ftp entirely because of its long history of problems, but I hate to do that. As this is a shared Interland site, I'm not entirely in control of all services, so I'm a bit limited in that regard anyway.

Well, hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Backup regularly, watch the logs, check and double check published exploits to see if they apply to anything I use, rinse, repeat. Life in the internet age.

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