Lawlessness Abounds

I am not an expert on security, by any means. I can say that I have had virus problems in Windows, and I can clearly remember the ‘I love You’ virus. Our network administrator happened to be standing next to a few servers when the hard drives all started to thrash at once. He shut them down right away and saved us from a lot of damage. We had 200 employees, all of who had received several copies of the virus in an email, many of whom were opening their emails and launching the virus.

I can also say that I have enjoyed the feeling of security I have had while using Linux at home. My machines are protected by a firewall, and most virus attacks target the Windows operating system, I am sure. However, looking at the log files of the two Linux machines I am running on the Internet is scary.

Both server logs show that somebody has been trying to gain control of my machines using SSH, and another shows that someone has been trying to gain access using FTP. The attacks began within hours of my launching the services, and they continue all day. I do not expect anybody to succeed any time soon, but, having seen the user name/password combinations that these attacks are attempting to use, I have definitely begun to use strong passwords.

Some of these attacks must be made by robot programs – the logs show repeated attempts from a single IP address for five minutes, and then the attacks stop. I have yet to look at the techniques that are used to defend against these attacks, but I have been thinking that I could write a daemon to detect the unsuccessful attacks and then automatically configure the server to refuse all connections from the attacking computer for the rest of the day. Before writing any code, though, I am going to look into the tools that are commonly used to defend networks. If my idea is any good, someone has probably done it already.

For now, I just want to end with the following observation: It’s a scary world out there. Imagine trying to sleep in your bed as stranger after stranger trespasses on your property, peeking into the windows and trying all of the doors. Or, imagine trying to shop as a riotous crowd is breaking store windows and trying to make off with the consumer electronics equipment in the display. My logs indicate that that is what the Internet is like – it is like the Wild West: lawlessness abounds.