Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
Two Brute Force Attacks in One Week
February 23, 2012
Last week was interesting – we sustained two brute force attacks, hammered hundreds of times in a very short time frame. We traced one attack to a Reston, VA colo so we don't know where it was really originating from but the other we traced to China.
This allowed us to join the ever-growing club of those who have suffered China-based attacks. It was also a targeted attack because they knew our names and tried them as IDs and passwords along with default IDs like "administrator."
Our guys quickly blocked all traffic from the attacking IPs, but I thought it was well worth mentioning that these attacks demonstrate two points we constantly underscore in our lectures.
- Change all defaults.
- Use complex passwords of 12 or more characters.
These relatively simple attacks were not going to work in our case - but the "door rattlings" came so fast that they actually acted like a Denial of Service (DoS) attack and bogged down the network until we blocked the offending IP addresses. Another reason we were able to quickly react is because we monitor network activity.
Just another day in the firehouse. Where IS that Dalmatian?
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