Comments on: Hack-a-Library Month

By: MACK

MACK — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:34:43 +0000

at my library, there is no internet. the computers are old compaq deskpros locked on their website. you cant minimize or bring the toolbars up. how do i bypass this?

By: Eby

Eby — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 03:50:35 +0000

I can only see an increase in the future. Libraries often have useful data on patrons, some even Social Security numbers from what I’ve read. Compared to other services that have such information, libraries are probably an easy target. One more reason to be careful what you store and where. An unfortunate example:

http://techbase.msu.edu/viewpathfinder.asp?id=3142&service=help

By: john

john — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 03:24:30 +0000

I’ve seen it too, what caught my attention was the coordinated nature of the attack, and the simultaneous start/stop times of each.

By: Eby

Eby — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 22:34:23 +0000

I see this on my personal servers all the time. My friends do to. Pretty much anything with SSH gets hit by bots, not just libraries. I get hit probably every couple days. Some of my friends get hit almost constantly.

If you run linux (you should) then you may like the sshdfilter script or the second page that shows how to throttle invalid attempts using iptables, etc. I’ve found that it helps cut down on traffic, logs and attempts.

http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~greg/sshdfilter/
http://la-samhna.de/library/brutessh.html