On Uninvited Guests at Christmas

This makes Christmas Eve #2 that I woke in the morning to discover a nasty surprise on my server.

In case there is any doubt as to how I feel about this, allow me to make it painfully clear: STAY OFF MY COMPUTER!

Today's incident wasn't catastrophic, although it easily could have been. On 12/24/98, some dork rooted my server and attempted to remove everything. Clean up was a real pain, and the worst part was that I *knew* about the hole and had mistakenly left it active--I thought I had disabled it. Since '98, I've redoubled my efforts and have managed to keep this server free of riff-raff until today. Fortunately for me, my multi-tiered approach to security has paid off. Today's would-be intruders were trying to get that shell for weeks. When they finally managed to get in, they couldn't get any of their root kits to work.

Poor babies.

With that, I'm off to make cranberry sauce, wrap one last gift and rest easy knowing this hole is finally plugged and nothing really bad happened. Not only that, but I even had time for some last minute shopping...

Merry Christmas!