Just pour it on, home hack, success

So even though the yard was already a functional lake Mother Nature seemed to not give a fck, dumping another four plus inches of rain on the property last night.  Without a doubt, this is the worst rainy season I have experienced since moving to Florida.  I absolutely hate it.

The chicken area last ngiht was completely submerged, front and back.  I told Cindy we need to let them out into the main yard for a couple days so they can get to some high ground.  It’s no good for them to be standing in a cesspool all day long.  The property is already a mess, letting the chickens roam around there for a couple days isn’t going to change much.

Yesterday I was remoted to my home server for something and noticed something odd.  There were some browser windows open to some dating site.  What was odder was that Chrome and Firefox were installed on the system and I was not the one that did it. In addition on the desktop were several jpg images of random people.  Obviously, I had been hacked. Of course I flew into remediation mode.

When I looked at my installed programs I saw the Chrome and Firefox had been installed on July 26th so I uninstalled them, assuming they were part of whatever the hackers were using to gain access.  I also installed Norton Security Suite.  I had uninstalled the Vipre AV protection I had on there a month or two ago because of problems I was having. When I rebooted the server I was no longer able to get remote access, it said my password was invalid, wtf….  So I was unable to look at it further until I got home.

My initial assumption was the Norton firewall was screwing with my remote access so I figured when I got in front of the server last night I would be able to log in from the console.  Nope, my password no longer worked….  They evidently changed my password as well.  Luckily I had another account I could get access with which I used to change my password to something pretty unguessable.

So once I got access again I continued my investigation.  I installed and ran Malware Bytes which came up clean as well as a Norton scan.  I figured they likely got in via RDP so I changed the port my firewall port forwards RDP on so that door would be closed.  I monitored the server during the night to verify no other access attempts were made.  So far all seems well.  Of course it is annoying and somewhat worrisome that someone got on the box however my home server serves a much lesser role in my home IT structure nowadays since my email has now moved to the cloud and any important files live on Dropbox.  Still, I will be keeping an eye on things because you can never let hackers win.

So I finally got some successful prints off my new CR-10 printer last night.  I first did a first layer adhesion test print followed by an EUC mudguard print so I could compare it to what I printed on the Finder.  The print came out well although the support material seemed a little too robust and difficult to remove.  I still have a lot to learn but I am getting there slowly.