Let me define a few terms in the IT world:

Hackers: Used to be known as the seedy, dodgy guys in films who break PCs. Nowadays hackers are the elite programmers who can turn Lead into Gold and such.

Crackers: Always considered “bad”, and now taken on the original definition of hacker. Crackers break things for their own purposes (spam, taking down servers etc).

I’ve had a run-in with some crackers lately which is starting to annoy me. As a server administrator, I wish I could do more about it. PCs in Saudi Arabia, Korea and China have been doing their best to take over my server through SSH, and in separate attempts, turn my server into a spam “bot”.

The widespread abuse of PCs and servers worldwide is becoming a serious issue. I have enough experience to keep these guys out (though I should have changed my SSH port before today…) and haven’t been seriously affected by it, but what about the other guys?

I’m a strong believer in security above all else, but I’ve been somewhat upset recently by a large company not using basic security consistently in their own card processing example code.

I think the point I’m making is twofold:

1. People need to consider security more carefully. You never know what will happen or when. Change default SSH and Remote Desktop ports. Sanitise all your data. Use passwords that no one could possibly ever guess. Use blacklists and blacklist data providers. Implement brute force limitations.

2. Governments need to consider cracking and PC abuse more seriously. If someone breaks into 1000 houses and steals a little money from each, they’d be in prison. If you steal 1000 bank records and commit minor fraud on each, you stand a fair chance of getting away with it. Hell, if you’re in the right country, no one will care.

The world needs to sit down and enforce specific laws around cracking, proxy servers without sufficient logging and infact any service that doesn’t maintain reasonable IP logging. Server owners worldwide need to be held responsible for continuously allowing (willingly or through negligence) cracking, unlawful or illegal activities on their systems. If you’re not logging it and willing to pass this on to the relevant authorities as required, you should be held partially responsible.

You do something illegal on my server, I’m rollin’ over on ya.

Couple of posts ago I mentioned a new VPS. I’ve been working with a cPanel VPS in work for a long time now, and ran WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) self-configured at home so I was fairly confident I could install and run a basic system on the VPS with my own control panel…

Wrong.

IPTables, BIND, various mail servers… It fast became unmanageable, even when I gave up and installed Webmin. I think my general advice to the community is: Be sure of your LAMP (see, linux not windows) expertise before you try anything like this.

So I reimaged the VPS using LxAdmin (now renamed Kloxo). I should have listened to the advice from the hosting company. Stability issues from the outset. I’m sure there was a configuration issue, but I was having to PuTTY into the server and restart services on a semi-regular basis.

I swallowed my pride, let the moths out of my wallet and finally got cPanel. You know, even considering its cost, I think it’s under-rated. Considering management time, time = money, I’m definitely saving money by paying. Odd sentence, eh?

On a related note, myprohost.com have been very supportive and helpful during my confusion and migration to different systems. Thumbs up to them.

I thought it was about time I upped my game in hosting solutions, so I just bought myself a gift – a VPS. I guess it’s about time I brushed up on my bash. Lets see how they go…