Long time again… Sometimes I feel like I am gathering inspiration for too long, and it starts defusing after a while.

There is a perfect timing – a sweet spot – for writing a poem or a python package. If you miss it  that’s it, you missed it… You need to gather your inspiration all over again…

It’s been almost a year since my first post (Dating as a form of Penetration Testing). It is time for a break-up parallelization. Here we go!

 

Incident Response as a form of a Break-up

The Setup

Sometimes bad things happen. Those bad things vary in type, but a security incident in a company can be a very bad thing. A Bad like Jesse James thing. A company can lose thousands of $ or € because of a spear-phishing campaign, or a compromised account on the database server.

A break-up, in the other hand is a more straightforward thing. You gotta get separated from someone or something beloved (I won’t forget the moment I gave up my ThinkPad, for my corporal machine).

For a guy the beloved thing is his girlfriend (or even his boyfriend), for a sys admin it’s the rootkit‘d File Server (he spend days and mojo building).

And you gotta get separated for sure… The Relationship/Server is no good anymore. It actually does more harm than good…

Going Deeper

Technically speaking, there are several phases, both on an incident response, and on a break-up. And if you think of it hard enough, they seem to be the same phases…

SANS documents the Incident Response Phases in the GCIH cert material as follows:

• Identification
• Containment
• Eradication (Cleaning Up)
• Recovery
• Lessons Learned

Hell, doesn’t this sound awfully familiar already?

So, let’s shine! Our star tonight: the Separated & Hacked SysAdmin

 

Identification

“I don’t actually feel the same way I used to with her. I feel nothing when I touch her… I don’t care if I will be seeing her tonight or not“

# ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.0 19356 648 ? Ss May20 0:02 /sbin/init
root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S May20 0:00 [kthreadd]
root 3 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S May20 0:03 [migration/0]
[...]
root 4108 0.0 0.0 11716 548 ? S May20 0:02 /usr/sbin/.httpd
apache 37008 0.0 0.0 213148 11328 ? S May21 0:04 /usr/sbin/httpd

It is this time! The shivers you get. The mindblow. The spine that tingles a bit. The urge to cry… The realization that you have no tears…

It happened on Monday. It had to be about 19:something. Stayed at work late and had to come at her place for the night. The moment he was typing the ps command (for no reason, like every Linux guy who is bored in front of the #), he was thinking of his girlfriend…

Stayed late just to have some time alone. Didn’t have work to do. Didn’t need to be at work at all. But, for some reason he couldn’t get his head around the forthcoming sleepover. It ‘d be the same thing again. The same meal, the same sex, the same “Calvin and Hobbes” comic in the WC… He wouldn’t do it.

Then he grasped the ps output. Couldn’t actually believe what he was staring at. At first he was like “Hey, my httpd ain’t running as root. I fixed the config two days ago“. And then he went: “what the fuck is this bro?” (he loves P.C. Principle from South Park).

After the shock he had two phone calls to make. More like three. The first one was to his girlfriend. Talked about the incident. He couldn’t come over… He was somewhat hopeful for this. Somewhat… Sometimes digital forensics are better than sex. But that night… That night anything was better than sex!

And then he called the Incident Response team, and his best friends. Ordered pizza from the office to his home (that makes it four phone calls). Arranged a meeting for tomorrow morning with the Incident Response guys and headed for home were his friends were also heading after the Bromance Alarm.

He had to figure out both issues the following day. How comes he can’t see her face in his mind?. How this rogue process was planted? He had to get his shit together…

 

Containment

SANS got me on this again! SANS explains the Containment Phase as “to stop the bleeding“. SANS guys must be really experienced with break-ups apart from sleuthkit.

So, the sys-admin guy broke-up the next morning. He was the smart type of guy – he didn’t depress his feelings. He felt like so and he broke-up!

Ironically, he did so over the phone, while the Incident Response guys were unplugging the Ethernet from his server (after gathering live memory dumps of course)…

The containment phase began the same evening. He gathered the gang again and went to a Pub. Got almost wasted with just beers and nachos. Then he introduced himself to a stranger, while his friends were constantly provoking him, like high-schoolers (do we –men– actually ever escape the high-school age?). Told everything to her, while constantly burping like Rick from Rick and Morty.

He knew nothing about what was going to happen next… He knew nothing about the Nightingale Syndrome that the woman was under. To make a long story short, after almost crying on her arms, they got pre-laid in the Pub’s WC and completely laid in her place…

She became his “rebound girl” for a while. He slept over in her house for almost a week. He went home to pick up things like toothbrush and clothes. Too many memories in there… It was time for…

 

Eradication

The Friday Night was a bummer. All day Friday in work he was trying to remove the malware from the compromised server. There were also, crontabs, services, even a kernel mod was found by the forensics team…

He kept removing shit and more shit kept spawning. Rogue binaries in /root/bin/ and bogus entries in lsmod output… All day Friday he was removing malware…

Then he got home. A Friday evening. His friends were all busy and he kind of missed his ex.

What follows is often seen in movies and teenager video-clips. He got his zippo and went to the bathroom with all the pictures he had from the previous holidays they did together. He set them on fire on the bathtub. Later he brought presents and all romance-shit card-postals and letters from the Erasmus era. Her old sunglasses, her toothbrush, 3 pairs of socks… He kept burning stuff all night and more kept spawning…

 

Recovery

He took days burning stuff and drinking Mountain Dew or Dr. Pepper. He also made a new friend – the pizzaboy. Gained some weight, stopped going out, lost the NBA finals. He was a mess for some time…

 

Then, suddenly one morning, he woke up motivated! Went for a walk before work by himself. Had some push-ups before putting his jeans on. It was time to finally recover…

Went to work and rebuilt the whole server. LDAP authentication, public key only authentication on SSH, remote sys-logging, etc.

Then he got home. Cooked a meal for himself, after a long time. Brewed some coffee. Checked out Hacker News from his Android, like he used to, even before he met his ex.

Later that day, he went to the Pub, alone. Got some beer and sat by the window, alone. Nothing happened. None talked to him and he talked to no one. He did some thinking, all by himself.

Before going to bed, ’round midnight, he remembered he loved Kerouac and Burroughs. Their books were on the shelf collecting dust for too long. It had been years since he last read his favorite books. Goddammit, what had happened to him…

Fell asleep while reading the Junky, feeling nostalgic. It was the first day for the rest of his life…

 

Lessons Learned

He went to work earlier that morning. Determined. Whatever fucked that server up wouldn’t happen again. At least wouldn’t without him noticing…

Utilized syslog everywhere. Everywhere! Even to the coffee machine. Spent countless hours setting up Kibana, added a Suricata to the firewall appliance and FINALLY created VLANs!

The thing went personal. This was not just his company’s network, it was his personal fortress…

 

He stayed up late at work, and when he got home, he got a beer and did some more thinking. Why did he abandon everything while being with his ex-girlfriend? Why did he give up all the music he used to like? His favorite books? His friends? His role as linux-guru sys-admin?

Felt a bit desperate on why he left everything for her. Couldn’t understand why he lost the best bits of himself just by being with her… He wouldn’t do that again.

The thing went personal. He was not just a body and soul looking forward to mate again, he was his personal fortress…

 

 

 

Highly inspired by “\”How To Break Up\” Tales Of Mere Existence” and my life.

Thanks for reading my 12th article.