"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." --Bishop Desmond Tutu

Friday, January 30, 2009

It happens to the best of us, I guess

My home Linux server (running Debian if you must know!) was compromised a couple of days ago. Turns out they used my ex-wife's old account (which I never disabled) to turn my otherwise safe system into a SPAM machine. Apparently they also tried (unsuccessfully) to "root" the box as well. But I check for patches every day so there were no holes to exploit.

When I discovered the break-in, there were over 14,000 messages in the mail queue (usually there are none). I quickly cleared these out but what little damage that could be done was now done. My use of the Yahoo VIP SMTP relays was disabled so I had to switch back to the semi-lame RoadRunner relays. Not a huge issue, but irritating. According to the error message, the VIP servers should respond again in 24 hours. So we'll see if I have to figure out how to get Yahoo to fix me or not.

Fun!

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