[NTLUG:Discuss] SRJ servers hacked and destroyed!

[Jason Fortezzo]

At 06:17 PM 7/8/2000, you wrote:
 >Amazing that you used the word "us" to describe crackers. If you are indeed
 >a cracker can you tell us how one justifies causing havoc in a small
 >business by destroying a system? This has cost me over 14 grand - that's
 >enough to feed a small village with - and all because some punks thought it
 >would be fun to hack into my company.
 >
 >Perhaps hackers perfer to be called crackers - but I perfe - that is to to
 >refer to them as the low life scum criminals that they are - is it actually
 >correct that you perfer to assiciate yourself with these types of
 >individuals who would replace all my customers home pages with kiddi porn?

Amazing how you gracefully dodged the fact that you made a the mistake
of running notoriously unsecure daemons on your web server.  Who in their
right mind runs ftpd (wu-ftpd?), and bind on a web server?
Nothing is secure forever, you have to keep up with the latest 
vulernabilities or
else your toast.  Frankly, your bitching and whining about how some script 
kiddies
rooted your box is drole.  It will happen to everybody soon enough, and you 
should
be thankful they didn't do something worse.  I admit kiddie porn is 
deplorable and
anybody who puts that up should be lynched.

You might want to look into a good IDS tool (Snort seems to be popular), a 
good
firewall (OpenBSD/IPF is my favorite), replacing telnet with OpenSSH
(http://www.openssh.com) and something to discourage port scans such as 
Port Sentry
(http://www.psionic.com/abacus/portsentry/).  Also check out the Linux 
Administrator's
Security Guide (http://www.securityportal.com/lasg/) for some good pointers.

As for your rant about crackers and hackers, perhaps you should do some 
more reading
on the matter before you mouth off.  The Jargon File explains the difference:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/hacker.html and
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/cracker.html.
Also check out RFC 1983 at http://sunsite.auc.dk/RFC/rfc/rfc1983.html for 
some definitions.



Jason Fortezzo
fortezzo at directlink.net
http://galvani.tamu.edu/~bigjason/pgpkey
---
If you have any trouble sounding condescending,
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                     --Scott Adams