[TriLUG] Have I been compromised?

[Andrew Perrin]

On Thu, 23 May 2002, Andrew C. Oliver wrote:
3. If you were compromised by someone who knew what they were doing,
> you'd probably never know except by your disk trashing and your nic
> light blinking like heck

3a. The chances are you weren't hacked by someone who knew what they were
doing -- a large percentage of hacks seem to be the "work" of "script
kiddies" who simply download existing scripts and try to find vulnerable
hosts. Sometimes minor changes in default installations can foil these
intruders; for example, at a prior employer the fact that we had a
directory called /.A foiled an intruder script, since it tried to create
such a directory.

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Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu