Bewildering Stories Editorial

by Jerry Wright

Scum Sucking Hacker Dogs

Well, the foul hacker dogs who forced us up to Canada are now attacking this server. Starting January the 16th, they tried again and again to break into the Bewildering Stories Server and take it over. So they can send out quadrillions of Spam Messages, and make our little home a zombie.

They came from multiple IP addresses, they'd try one username after another, again and again, until they hit a timeout, forcing them to another address.

Finally, yesterday, the server started screaming:
Jan 21 10:44:19 fastmail sshd[20559]: Illegal user uploader from 210.22.12.56 Jan 21 10:44:19 fastmail sshd[20559]: reverse mapping checking getaddrinfo for sunym.gdsz.cncnet.net failed - POSSIBLE BREAKIN ATTEMPT!

And after a long string of attempted break-ins, they gave up and moved to another address from which to attack us: Jan 22 03:49:16 fastmail sshd[24574]: Illegal user chantal from 211.162.78.106 Jan 22 03:49:16 fastmail sshd[24574]: reverse mapping checking getaddrinfo for servers.szgwbn.net failed - POSSIBLE BREAKIN ATTEMPT!

So, finally, about 6 this morning, they hit paydirt with a User created by the Knoppix installation. Arrrgh. Y'know I fixed the other holes, and I know about this one, and warned my fellow Knoppix Linux users, but somehow, I just missed this server. And the bad guys didn't find it, nor try attacking it, until it became the BwS server. Why? What have WE done to desrve that. Anyway, I'm going to spend some time hardening the server, which of course is more difficult when it needs to have Webpages being served and FTP so that Don and I can do our magic. Arrrgh. Kill... Mutilate.... Destroy!