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It happens to everyone...

Through a combination of unhealthy fears, paranoid tendencies, and luck, I’ve been able to avoid that unavoidable situation that every sysadmin fears: completely nuking a system. Until last Tuesday, when I did something really, really dumb. On the server that hosts http://chr.ishenry.com, I had noticed a script, svcrack.py, running and consuming lots of resources, and bandwidth, as I would later find out from my hosting bill.

Since I sure as hell wasn’t running that, I could only assume that someone had exploited my server and was using it to look for unsecured voip installations. Initially, I assumed killing the scripts and changing some passwords would be sufficient. However, checking in the server later, I found the same script running. All this is fair enough, as I am on Wordpress, a few versions behind, and there are enough folders with unhealthy permissions that I kind of deserved it. So after a few days of trying to lock things down, I got a bit desperate.

Since svcrack is a python script, there was a good chance the best way to discourage my assailant would be to remove python. Great idea in theory, but it seemed my execution was a bit poor. It turns out running ‘yum remove python’ is a great way to destroy your entire system. yum runs on python, which meant a reinstall would have to be done manually. Only problem, most of the shell bultins stopped working as well. cp, mv, ls all resulted in a ‘command not found’ error. The best part of this situation: no backups. After all the [hubbub about blogs and backups](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/12/international-backup- awareness-day.html) lately, it’s kind of amazing I missed this rather important detail.

I’ve always considered data loss the cardinal sin in development, web or otherwise. However, I also never considered my personal site to be mission critical, or worthy of taking the the time for backups. But as they say, you never know what you have till it’s gone. I was lucky enough that mysql and apache were still running, and I was able to export everything, spin up a new server, and import. Even with no data loss, this is certainly a lesson learned. I am making a backup right now.

Published Sep 25, 2010

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