Uhh dude… you got hacked

Author here -

The purpose of going through and removing the malicious scripts was to learn more about server security. I figured if I had been compromised I might as well learn what was causing it and how to fix it.

I have since toasted the server and set it back up with all of the things I mention in the article. I wrote the piece because I felt that there might be others out there who can learn from my mistakes and to also have a record for myself.

We are always learning and sometimes we need to learn the hard way, I got lucky in that this was on a side project and not any real client work.

Ow man that is bad!

Thanks for sharing. Lessons shared from this post:

    1- Lock down ALL ports you are not using with either iptables or ufw.


    2- Be sure to always run system updates, 

even with doing this the exploit still made it in, but the updates can help.

    3- Use tools available to you such as iptraf, nethogs, and iftop.


    4- Watch your cronjobs and strange startup files

I think locking down the ports that are not required is a very important thing to do.

I have faced such stuff, but with lower traffic luckily ended up creating a whole instance and server and ripping a part old configs and setup.

When someone compromises your system, you can't know everything that has been done. The only truly safe thing to do is reinstall everything from scratch, backing up configs of course.

How did they get in,in the first place?