Anyone have any idea why there was so many users online in this forum on this date?

Most users ever online was 589 on Mon Jan 24, 2005 8:57 pm

 

It was a hacker D.o.S. attack...denial of service attack. Typical noob hacker exploit...kind of like riding your bike for the first time with your training wheels still on. It succeeded in slowing down the server a bit, but nothing more and was over with pretty quickly.

 

Oh, OK.

Just a little tidbit. In my previous job I was in charge of the T1 connection to our building and the upkeep of our server. Every morning I checked the log and there was thousands and thousands of failed attempts at trying to break into our machine.

They were using a back door method that would return usernames of FTP account holder which were special accounts for our customers to transfer data too. The passwords were complicated with letters, numbers and special characters so chances were very slim they could guess it. Even if they did get in the data was useless to them.

So they had a list of usernames and I could see the automated procedure they were using to run down the list one by one every night trying the next password in their program like A, A1, A2, A3....and so on.

I then created an FTP account called PAYROLL with an easy to guess password. In that directory was sub directories like Employee-Data-Base, Insurance-Data_Base and so on. These directories contained huge data base files used by universities as test data bases that really contained no real data on real people.

I then created a directory called EXE with an executable program that I wrote.

The password was guessed by many hackers who transfered all the data from every directory onto their machines. There was 7 total.

All 7 hackers executed the program to try and read the data base files but the only thing the program did was terminate with a standard Windows error and exited.

One month later on a Sunday afternoon given their geographical location the bug I planted when they executed the payroll program kicked off.

The program I planted first sent email to me indicating another successfull attack.

Being an old school programmer I used BIOS commands to attack. I first put up a full screen display indicating their machine was toast, all files deleted and that I hope they enjoyed my payroll program.

A BIOS is the most low level part of any computer called the Basic Input Output System where raw commands can be given to any hardware on the machine.

I not only wiped out all their hard drives but after eraseing a block of data I wrote 0 to all locations. I didn't just destroy the file pointers as is normall the case when deleting a file. After all hard drives were trashed I put the message on the screen.

 

A word about those test databases, from another old-school programmer.

In many cases they would use a mixture of live data and phony data. They/I/We would sometimes change things on the live data to test for certain things.

 

Rather interesting topic.. I never knew there were so many junior achievers out there trying to hack message boards. At least it's good to know that they get spiked in return though.