A New Year, A New Lesson
It’s good to have a week vacation for the holiday’s. I got to spend a lot of time at home and with my girlfriend’s family. It’s bad when you learn that on New Year’s day your entire network gets shutdown by IS.
While at my girlfriend’s family’s house in Sellersville, PA I didn’t bring my laptop of course (why would I? I’m on vacation?). I use the laptop floating around the house to check my mail every so often. I received an e-mail from one of my colleagues telling me that the network and servers are not reachable. Confused, I check online with the laptop and sure enough all servers are down (including the one this site is hosted on). I decided to log onto Meebo and find my IS guy. He’s online and I quickly ask him what the deal is. He tells me that there was an attack on my network from New Year’s Eve until he shut it down the next day. Apparently he couldn’t stop the attacks after around 3 hours or trying to so he shutdown my entire sub-net. Thankfully it’s on downtime, but the website was completely unavailable.
I cannot do anything about this until I go back to work, today. I call up IS to get my network opened again and about a minute after activating it the attacks start up again. I explain to him that I need the network so try to block the attacking address, or tell me which address it’s attacking. After a few minutes I receive a call from him explaining that it’s only one address that’s being attacked. I get the name and address and immediately recognize it as a small server for a special project run by my boss and 2 students. I quickly shutdown the server and wait….
The network load goes down, the attacks cease, and all is finally back to normal.
Four days of complete network downtime all from one small server that should only be used by 3 people at most, not a good thing. So another lesson learned; if you’re hosting a server for a project, even a very small one that no one even knows about, make sure it’s COMPLETELY locked down except the ports you NEED.
Oh and just a small note: I did tell them to make sure it’s closed before they plug it into my network, apparently I need to check beforehand even when people tell me it’s done.
Happy New Year to all, and I hope your holiday was a good one!
