It is seventy-two degrees outside right now. My window is open and the pigeons (recently uprooted from their home in the now-destroyed abandoned grandstands) are cooing at me. A stiff breeze blows the multitude of papers on my desk about, turning my room into a small-scale cyclone. The forecast for tomorrow? Forty-nine. This past weekend? Thirty. WTF Nebraska, you’re not Colorado. You’re supposed to be more stable than this.

A bulky CRT appeared in my room a while back, apparently I’d lent it to somebody about a year ago and he brought it back. I was like, “What do I do with this thing?” There’s no room on my desk for CRTs any more, I live my life in flat-panel glory. Ah, but an idea blossoms! Hark back (I believe that hearken back is also correct grammar) to the days of my freshman year, listening to a senior CS student speak about turning an old worthless computer into an always-running slideshow set up outside his door, displaying things like comics and so forth. My roommate just upgraded to a new dual-proc gaming box, so he had his old ‘puter stuffed in the corner holding up, I think, clothes. Quick, dust that guy off, oops, find a hard drive, okay, install Ubuntu because the disc was closest, run some extra-long VGA cable and put the monitor on a bucket in the hallway, set up FTP and slam some photos into the screensaver and alrighty, hey! That’s pretty cool. We’re up to about 150 pictures right now in just under 400 megs. Later on I’ll write a script to troll the Dilbert and Foxtrot websites and scrape the daily comic from them, that’ll be sweet.

So when you set up a box and start your SSH service and open good ol’ port 22, remember that since you can access it from the outside world, everybody else can too. Normally not a problem because, hey, you’re relatively unknown and you choose good passwords and so forth, right? You don’t often make a username and password the same, do you? I hope not, because when somebody performs a dictionary attack on you, they will crack your server. And they will use it for malicious activity.

Brief aside: Remember how my window was open? Remember how I live in Nebraska? Yeah, the cows are blowing inside. I’ll go ahead and close that.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Cox shuts down our cable. I try browsing to a site about… uh.. oh yeah, Apple’s new announcements. Can’t access anything, reboot the router, no dice, reboot the modem, hey presto, announcement page about Cox shutting down our cable for hacking. Pause for puzzled fear. Hacking? I didn’t do that… did you do that? Anyone else doing anything funky? No? Ten digits, hey Cox, what up? “You have a virus on your computer.” Uh, no I don’t, we’re all compsci here and hey, we use Macintosh haha, what’s a virus again? No really, can you tell me what kind of traffic I was generating? SSH scanning? Really? Wow. Okay. Yeah, thanks for turning that back on.

Check the logs. User authentication failed for user a. User authentication failed for user b. User authentication failed for user c…. user authentication failed for user american… user authentication failed for user bob… user authentication failed for user jake… user authentication accepted for user jake. Password for user jake changed. “Well now, I guess I know what happened. Shouldn’t have made such an insecure password. Where did that come from?” The password was cracked from a cybercafe in Asia, and subsequent logons were from an ISP in Romania. I’m awfully lucky they compromised an unprivileged account, because gosh they could have done some harm to that system and my network. I’m also lucky Cox watches against hacking, because after they gained access they used it as a bridge to do scanning against other machines, which is why Cox blocked me.

Boy was that exciting… my first experience being hacked, and on a Linux box, too! Well, it was my fault, but wow. Within just a day or two of opening the port, too. I’d write more, but I’m really busy and I need to close some windows before I suffer serious drain bamage.

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