Having a bad day

The: 23/04/2011 - AT: 9:04

Do you know the expression "bad day"? Well, this is more like having a bad month, year, or whatever. At least i have had quite a few incidents in a short period of time, which mostly seem funny.

First, my lower back hurts like **** (Why is it doing that anyway?) as i write this blog post, and I've been awake the entire night, investigating a case of unauthorized access to Brugbarts phpMyAdmin.

The below happened from the bottom and up, and is basically a series of unfortunate events

The Hacker incident

I wasn't sure how he gained access at first, (rarely the case) but i was sure it was through phpMyAdmin, because he made a post in the news section, which would require knowledge of post types, which isn't exposed directly anywhere else. Plus, the post he made had no IP, which was a pretty good indication that he didn't post from the admin section.

It turned out he gained full access to the source code, and with it, the root password of the MySQL server, all through a SINGLE file.

I was aware that i had a potential SQL injection vulnerability in that file, but didn't foresee anyone using the file the way he did.


The first thing which comes to mind, is to close off access to the server from the Internet, until you have located the insecurity, and resolved it. This part is usually easy enough, as the log files will reveal it once you find the hacker.

The hard part can be to locate the events in the log, especially on larger sites. I was lucky, since i was aware that the attacker had visited phpMyAdmin, and as such i quickly located problem, and then it was obvious.

The FAN incident

One day i find myself trying to install an extra fan in my computer, but something ridiculous goes wrong, and i for some reason can't restore a picture on my screen, the power light was just blinking.

I first thought i damaged the CPU, and a pin was actually slightly bend. But when i re-installed the CPU, after bending the pin back in place, still no picture. I really thought i had fried it at this point.

Then i got the idea to unplug everything inside, and test things one by one. This didn't work, so i instead tried to test how the computer would boot without the CPU, and it didn't respond at all (obviously). This indicated the CPU had not taken any damage, so i finally tested the RAM.

I toke out one dimm and left the other one inside, tried booting, and everything worked. Then i turned off my computer, toke out the other dimm, and inserted the supposedly broken one, to see if anything was wrong with it, and it turns out nothing was wrong. Pretty annoyed, i finally tried swapping the dimms, and for unknown reason this turned out to work.

Broken Tripod Incident

My camera Tripod broke doing the last Christian song event. Ok its a minor incident, but it still qualifies.

The Ubuntu incident

Here i was, building a linux server to free up my own PC for other tasks, and hopefully save some power, when suddenly i had the idea to install the official driver.

I have had bad experiences with ATI and linux before, but this was a older nvidia card. Not that I'm going to use it anyway, since i will disconnect all hardware that the server doesn't need to run.

I don't remember the details for this one very well, just that i figured out to enter recovery mode, and change the driver to one that worked in the end.

The Build a Computer incident

One of my acquaintances had me build him a cheap computer, from parts that we brought of the Internet, (and by cheap i mean AMD cheap). He had with him some sort of air cooling monster, weighting about half a kilo, turns our they can be a nightmare to install if you haven't tried it before, (but thats unimportant).

The really freak show funny part is, that when everything was finished and we tried turning it on, (me joking that it may blow up as i usually do), no picture!

And i tried everything which i could think of, only to finally learn that i forgot to put in the little 4-pin power cable to the motherboard, which should be obvious.

The office chair incident

It occasionally so happens, that the wire for my head phones get stuck in the wheals of the chair, (usually just below them).

Last time however, the wire decided to get twisted around one of the weals, so to my annoyance, i actually had to get up from my chair to "resolve the matter".

Comments: [0]

Author: BlueBoden