#10: Hacking

Before I start, I should warn you that this post fits in no other category other than “geekery”. Computers are something that I have always understood and respected, and that give me a lot of pleasure. Some people can’t understand this and think it’s weird, but I don’t question what they do for enjoyment, and they shouldn’t question what I do either.

In my bedroom at home, I have quite a few different computers. I do most stuff on my main PC, and use the others to learn and to experiment with things when I’m bored. Just to put things in perspective, here’s a list:

1) My main PC (Artemis) which is an AMD Athlon 2800+ with 1GB of RAM, a GeForce 6600 and about six hard drives (four IDE and two SATA) totalling over 700gb of space. It dual-boots Windows XP and Ubuntu off one of the SATA drives, and Windows Vista RC2 off the other.
2) A Linux box (Odysseus) which is an 800MHz AMD Duron with 512MB of RAM and twin 40GB Seagate drives in Linux Software RAID. It runs Kubuntu 6.10. I built it into an old case from other PC parts I have salvaged/stolen and it cost me next to nothing.
3) My laptop (Daedalus) which is a 1.3Ghz Intel Pentium III Mobile, with 256MB of RAM and a 20GB hard drive. It dual boots Windows 2000 SP4 and Kubuntu Feisty Fawn. It didn’t cost me anything.
4) My hardware-modded Xbox (Persephone) which runs EvolutionX, Xbox Media Center and various other emulators and software. It’s got a 40GB hard drive and also rus Xebian (Linux on Xbox). I bought it from a friend of mine for £30, and bought the modchip for it for a further £20.
5) My Apple Mac (Icarus) which is a Blue & White 400MHz PowerPC G3 (1MB L2 cache) with 768MB of RAM and twin 20GB Seagate Drives. It runs Mac OS X 10.4 (Jaguar). I bought it on eBay and it cost me £30.
6) My Xbox 360 (it’d have a greek name if I could give it one). It’s not technically a computer as you can only play games on it, but it’s an absolutely immense piece of hardware. It cost me more than just about all the others put together, but it was last year’s birthday present to myself.

All these are connected to a Netgear 8-port hub (which I stole), uplinked to a Linksys WRT54G in the roof of my house, running some custom firmware.

In September of last year, I was trying to set up a few things on Odysseus (the Linux box) as a learning exercise. I got halfway through this process and then got invited out by some friends. I left the box running and installing a few things, and went out.

I got a phone call from my brother about two hours later, complaining that the Internet was running “really slowly” and he couldn’t browse anything. We’d been having a few problems with NTL earlier in the day anyway, so I told him there was nothing I could do and he’d just have to grin and bear it until I got home.

When I got back a further couple of hours later, it took me a couple of minutes before I realised why everything was so slow. The load average on Odysseus had gone up drastically, and its light on my hub was flashing away nineteen to the dozen. Being as I hadn’t left it downloading when I went out, and nothing was connected to it, I wondered what on earth was going on. When I ran “top” and looked at the output, it made me shudder and pull the network cable out of the hub as fast as I could move. There were various alien processes running on my box that I knew absolutely nothing about! The main one was something called “pscan2″.

I realise now that what in fact happened was that I installed an FTP server on the system, which created an account called “ftp”. The password for this account was also for some reason set to “ftp”, and as I was in a rush to go out, I didn’t read the next step in the documentation, which was to change the password for that user to something a lot more secure. I ended up leaving the account totally unsecured (this is why you should never do things in a rush) and as port 22 was forwarded to Odysseus from my Internet IP, a simple SSH login spamming attack that probably took under a minute had bust my Linux box right open.

I took a look around to see what this “hacker” had done. It appeared that he had downloaded various scripts and binaries from Romanian FTP sites, and started them running on my box. One of them (pscan2) was just a simple port scanner, that connected sequentially to all IPs in a given range and probed for open ports - I suppose that my own vulnerability might have been discovered by the someone else’s box who fell victim to the same attack and was also running the pscan2 program. Another appeared to be a lightweight IRC client which had been connected to a server, but as no input to that client was logged (it was not only a separate application, but also running under screen) I couldn’t tell where it was connected to or what, if anything, was said. At a guess I’d say that it was similar to the old botnets that trojans modified by script kiddies used to connect to, so that the script kiddies could “rally” their controlled PCs and force them to all simultaneously send packets at a given IP address (a DDoS attack)

Needless to say, Odysseus was formatted and reinstalled from scratch to make sure that I hadn’t been rootkitted or anything similar without realising it. It is now far more secure than it used to be, and the attack taught me a valuable lesson about security and why it’s important.

You can see exactly what the person who got in ran before I stopped them here.

#9: British Summer Time

I like the fact that the clocks have now gone forward and there are more daylight hours. Sitting out in the sun with a beer is one of my favourite ways to relax - so now, rather than getting home from work and it being nearly dark and very cold, it’s quite light and very cold. Now all I need is the weather to improve…

I filled in a 16-page document for Asda and Wal-Mart yesterday which detailed the various ways in which our company web servers fulfill their exacting requirements. It was hardly scintillating stuff, but it was my first real experience of true big business bureaucracy and red tape. This document was so general in its approach (being designed to fit any kind of technological application that Wal-Mart may use) that I regularly found myself asking, “what the hell” while filling it in. It would be much easier if they gave me the phone number of a techie and said “Talk to them and answer their questions”, to be honest.

On another note - installing VMware on your work computer so that you can run both Linux and Windows on the same desktop is probably quite a good idea. The said work computer having only 512mb of slow RAM to share between your hungry Windows XP dual-monitor desktop and the virtual machine is a very bad idea, however. I’m actually quite scared to Alt+Tab due to the amount of time I’ll have to wait for swapping…

#8: Weekend

This weekend has been alright. I chilled out at home and watched TV on Friday evening, went out into town with a few mates for some beers on Saturday night, and then drove my parents to Lincoln on Sunday to visit my gran for Mother’s Day.

It would have been better if the bouncers on the Corn Exchange had decided to let me in though, rather than giving me some lip about the fact that I was wearing skateshoes. I like comfortable feet, what’s so wrong with that? :(

#7: Fridays

It is Friday, and this makes me happy. There are few finer things (in my opinion) than a nice Saturday morning lie-in - I tend to watch Hollyoaks which is an addiction I picked up due to having too much free time on my hands at University. The acting is pretty terrible, but it’s good “hungover” viewing as it contains a substantial amount of eye-candy and has the most implausible storylines at times.

Unfortunately, there are bad things to Fridays too. At work we have what are basically “casual Fridays”, where all the staff wear normal clothes for a day rather than the usual shirt and tie. We also have the radio on in my part of the office - when I first joined the company, we listened to stuff like Virgin Classic Rock and Virgin Radio which was brilliant, but now the boss has decided that he doesn’t like the adverts, so we have to go with the BBC Radio stations instead that don’t have them on. When he’s not here we can get away with Radio 1, which although loud and brash is usually alright. When he is in the office though… we have to put up with Radio 2.

And that really, really isn’t a good thing. My Dad listens to Radio 2, and he was 60 last year. Give me strength.

#6: Sunshine

This weekend has been lovely - the weather in my part of England has been the warmest so far this year, and it was lovely to cruise round in my car with the windows open and the tunes playing. It’s not quite been warm enough for the air conditioning yet, though.

I’ve started watching Heroes and I have to say, I’m a bit addicted. TuB shouted at me for its lack of plot, but I’m really not complaining to be honest. It’s got a decent amount of eye-candy and there is definitely a load of weird stuff going on, enough to make me ask questions but not enough to make it like Lost.

Lost is beginning to annoy me. They never explain anything to you, and then when they do, they’ll tell you something but it’ll make you ask another load of questions about something else. Sometimes I just feel like having something to watch that isn’t such hard work.

The football was quite good yesterday, although Spurs really should have made it 4-1 before half time, and they shouldn’t have gone off the boil and let Chelsea even things up again. All I can say is that I hope they win in the replay (I’m not a Spurs fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I dislike Chelsea a whole lot more)

I also rediscovered World of Warcraft this weekend. I put got three levels onto my warrior (taking him from 56 up to 59) and then decided I couldn’t be arsed again. I’ll probably let the rested XP build up again and log in in about two weeks!

#5: *yawn*

I’m very, very tired. I don’t think going to bed at 2:15am last night and then getting up at 8 for worked helped me much, but I really need some sleep :(

Thank god it’s Friday tomorrow.

#4: Traffic

Today, in my role as roving IT bod for a travel software company (i.e. one part of my job), I am at my company’s Redhill office. Redhill is about a 75 mile drive from my normal office, so usually I would get the train here. However I needed to bring a printer and some NAS with me, so I decided that driving would be better than sitting on a train cuddling a large Brother laser and a LaCie Ethernet Disk.

This morning, I left my house at 7:45am. I arrived in Redhill a bit after 11:30am. For the non-mathematical or lazy amongst my readers, this means that it took me nearly 4 hours to travel 75 miles. That’s absolutely fucking ridiculous.

The reason for this delay was pretty much fourfold. Firstly, it was raining cats and dogs this morning, which means everyone has to drive a bit slower and there are usually more accidents than there would be on a lovely sunny day. Secondly, there was heavy traffic on the A1(M) approaching the Hatfield tunnel. Thirdly, it took exactly one hour for me to travel 0.3 miles towards M25 junction 21A at Chiswell Green. Finally, there was a lorry blocking two lanes of the M25 at junction 12, which caused me a further 45 minutes delay.

On top of all that, the colour laser printer that was my primary reason for coming here hasn’t actually been delivered yet. If the traffic is anything like this bad on the way home, I will probably be home at around 10pm.

Christ :(

#3: Sunday

Today, I have done very little. I watched the Bolton vs Blackburn game (Blackburn won basically because they had two penalities given, there wasn’t a lot else to say) and I earnt £40 fixing a computer.

There were three fundamental things wrong with this computer:
1) It was running Windows XP on 128MB of RAM (ouch, swap file thrashing)
2) It was running Norton Antivirus (this is bad, no matter what)
3) Its ADSL modem/router combination had no microfilter between it and the wall socket

I got rid of the expired Norton Antivirus without a second thought and installed the wonderful AVG Free instead. The 128MB of RAM is more a problem, although I advised him that if he wanted his computer to speed up, he could shell out £50 or so and it would be a lot better.

The thing that made me laugh the most was the lack of microfilters in the system. Originally I wasn’t sure what the problem was, because he told me that he doesn’t answer the phone next to the computer any more because whenever he picks it up, it disconnects him from the Internet. This sounded a little odd, so I decided to investigate…


C:\Documents and Settings\User>ping -t webvictim.net
Pinging webvictim.net [80.175.29.126] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=24ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=46


Nothing wrong there at all, everything pretty much as I’d expect it to be. So at this point, I picked up the phone and started to talk into it as though I was answering a call.

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Reply from 192.168.1.1: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.1: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.1: Destination host unreachable.


I asked him how long it had been like this and he couldn’t remember. Wouldn’t you have done something about it before now?! I mean… honestly!

I advised him to purchase some microfilters :)

#2: Football

Liverpool played Manchester United earlier today, and their performance wasn’t bad at all. United of course got a cheeky goal right at the end as they love to do, and robbed the game from an otherwise mean-looking Liverpool. Scholes got sent off for swinging a punch at someone who tackled him, and rightly so I think - no need for that in the game.

I’m just watching Portsmouth vs Chelsea now while eating. Not sure where this one’s going to go.

Football is so much better when it’s free :-)

#1: So…

I bought this domain a while ago and always had the intention of writing my own blogging software in PHP to put on it. This was primarily because I wanted to prove I could do it, but in the end I realised I was just too busy with work, and so I installed Wordpress. It seems good, so far.