Probably one of the most stressful days ever. Starts off nice and relaxing with 90 machines or so compromised on campus with a new backdoor control program that some punk 14 year old kid was controlling (another security guy from a different university eventually started chatting with him and apparently made him poop himself by mentioning the fbi, and terrorism), followed up by another set of hackers who were a bit more intelligent, actually hacking routers and switches. I made the mistake of actually approaching the one hacker I knew was responsible and calling him out on it, asking him nicely to stop. Except I did it in a public channel that he was in, so he had to save face in front of his l33t friends by acting like a prick. In a private message he warned me that it sure was a good thing for me he was in a good mood or else, followed up by him exercising super-powers and kicking me from their little private chat channel (whee). I laughed and said goodbye. Then filtered access to all the switches he had gained access to.

That sort of antic really isn’t necessary and I probably wouldn’t have done it, but I was hoping maybe some sort of meaningful dialog would come from it. Oh well, lesson learned. The stress level was pretty high though; that’s a guy that claims to have control of about 60 thousand hosts that he could use to try to DoS me. Of course, I neglected to mention to him that I had a network connection and network engineers next to me such that I could probably survive and fight back more effectively than he might suspect, but it was still fairly nerve-wracking.

So I went home to relax from a stressful day only to realize that the new punk neighbors who moved in a few days ago that Jaime and I were joking about being drug dealers almost certain are. In the last 2 hours at least 5 cars have driven up, drivers walked inside (usually leaving someone waiting in the car), and left less than five minutes later. Must have been office hours for the dealer. In fact, one time the second half of the transaction occured outside when one of the inhabitants gave a visitor a hand slap that wasn’t particularly effective at covering the transfer of something small. Did I mention we think we saw them snorting lines on their dashboard the other day? Our condo has an excellent view into the parking lot, I assure you. I was worried enough that they were drug users, let alone dealers. Time to dig up old email addresses of friendly police officers.

The only good news is that by next monday (when I’m running a seminar at a conference alone instead of with someone else due to a family medical emergency), I can pretty much guarantee I won’t have much to be stressed about. That’ll be darn relaxing standing up in front of a group of peers most twice my age and in job positions averaging two levels above mine at other universities telling them what they should be doing.

Posted by Jordan on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2004 at 8:26 pm.