Why does the Internet have to be so hard?
I may have reached the point where my brain functionality has reached a peak with respect to what it takes to master the internet. To tell you how I reached the conclusion, I have to go back a few days.
Recently our dedicated web server saw in increase in attacks from malicious internet sources. They could be the Russian Mafia, Romanian teenage cyber-thugs, or just a rogue internet thief looking to score some personal data. Whatever the source, the attacks were giving our old security setup fits. (NOTE: If you don’t believe your computer is under attack when it is connected to the internet, you are WRONG. Look at your software firewall log and you will be SHOCKED at everyone trying to compromise your computer. Imagine how much harder they try to get into known internet web servers.)
We experienced this once before; our Linux web server was compromised, however, no personal data was stolen or damaged; the perps simply used it to send out gobs of spam. At that time we elected to place our dedicated web server behind a hardware firewall, a device that filters and traps only allowed internet traffic through to the actual server machine itself. This really helped, but even then we had configuration issues in getting all of the services to run correctly behind the firewall.
So dejavu all over again; we asked our data center staff to ‘harden’ our web server to increase data security. Linux servers by default only have login password security; some have software firewalls running at installation, ours does not. Hardening increases web server data integrity by decreasing the ways and methods of getting to that data. This protects the system from hostile network traffic, Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, and security breeches. It includes many steps that we will not outline here; why give you enemies your game plan? The hardening was done by our data center staff, but was not 100% error free the first run through.
I am only going to list here two problems we encountered along with their results. I do this to inform our users about times they were not able to take full advantage of our services. Of course we would have preferred a 100% error free procedure, but the long-term server hardening benefits we gained will far outweigh these short term disruptions.
1. After a reboot, the server did not load the correct IP information. Internet traffic getting through our firewall did not reach the server as it did not have the correct configuration. This resulted in a several hour ‘outage’ very early Friday morning. After I reported this to the data center, they fixed the problem and all of our web sites were again operational.
2. Email service for latter-dayvillage.com was down beginning at this same time. New security measures meant that name addresses (DNS) information for LDV’s email server was not updated properly. This is really a good thing, meaning a hacker should be able to maliciously change these settings. It took our data center staff a while to pinpoint and fix the problem (I provide mail server log information). Late Friday afternoon our assigned system administrator realized what the problem was and fixed it. Email service into LDV, including our email lists, was down for about eight hours on Friday.
There. Debra and I are feeling much more confident in our system security, and I have much more faith in our data center staff; they were very responsive and provided the information I needed to understand this upgrade process and its effects.
Yes, the internet is hard sometimes; harder than you would think to run an internet business. We are learning and getting better at it every day!
FYI: if you would like some technical details on Linux server hardening, see this list for an idea of the changes required.
