Hi Bruce, On Sunday 23 January 2005 14:09, Bruce Byfield wrote: > Christian Einfeldt wrote: > > A strange thing happened to me while I was working on the DTP > > site. Over the course of approximately 11 minutes, the number > > of visitors on that site jumped from about 4 to 50 and then > > back down to 2. I did notice that hits on the Cast page, our > > most popular page, had gone from a total of 514 to 552 since > > the last time that I had checked about 4 hours earlier. So > > maybe they were real visitors, and not some kind of computer > > glitch somewhere in the world. > > Hard to say. It could be a random blip, or someone could have > been probing the site for vulnerabilities. > > If it were a probe, it may not be a malicious one. Some people > check for sites' weak points out of curiosity, and a few even > write to tell the sites' owners what they found.
Thanks for this info. > > However, if you want to be careful, you might want to mention > what happened to whoever manages the site, and maybe talk about > security - not just the site's, but also that on your own > machines. Thanks again for this. > > This precaution is probably especially important in your case, > since, if I remember correctly, you routinely run as root. Only on my Linspire notebook, which is behind a corporate firewall run by a serious GNU/Linux geek. Most of my time is spent on a SuSE box which runs in a user account. The Linspire box is an empty shell with no significant data. I would only loose my software configurations. > Should > the site ever happen to be compromised, and you go to upload > files to the site, then there's a direct conduit for damaging > your machines. The machines running the DTP sites are professionally managed also. > > You might especially want to ask about (or do an Internet search) > on the concept of defence in depth. The term's more or less > self-explanatory, but its application is worth understanding. Thanks, I will look at this.
