Hackers and DOS attacks and Maybe a Jabberwocky?

I’ve been a little, well, uneasy about the fact that I’m connecting to the net through the school server. It’s not that I’m hacking webservers out there or anything — frankly, I wouldn’t be able to do it, even if I wanted to — but it’s just that I don’t like the idea that anyone — even the most sympathetic sysadmin out there in internet-land — can have a look at my internet activity. It’s my own private life, isn’t it? That’s how I feel.

So I recently installed an app called anon-proxy. It’s just a little gidget that supposedly makes your web activities anonymous, though, heck, who knows, maybe it doesn’t work.

But it apparently does something. The University server flagged my PC as being used in a Denial of Service attack to, well, some unknown attack. I have a feeling that the sysadmin just misinterpreted my proxy activity as some kind of DDOS attack. I can’t be sure, though, so I’ll have to check on the Ubuntu Forums, and I may be reinstalling Ubuntu one more time if the verdict is bad. We’ll see. I’m hoping it can wait a few days, till Friday morning at least. This time, I’m definitely going to look into security. I didn’t know backdoor attacks and the like happened to Unix users — I thought it was generally just a Windows thing. Argh! So much to learn!

2 thoughts on “Hackers and DOS attacks and Maybe a Jabberwocky?

  1. At one point, my employer was providing internet service (along with appropriate hardware) to all the employees. And we KNEW that someone was going to look at the log files. Not a problem if you’re just hitting rickross.com heavily for 2 weeks, but if you call in sick when you’ve been looking at porn until 4AM, that’s just not going to look good. And you will be mocked at the meeting you’re missing from being out “sick”.

  2. Hahaha. That’s funny.

    Personally, I’m more worried about someone having issues with Season 2 of Lost via Bittorrent. I just don’t want to fall that far behind on North American pop culture, to be honest. But the techie asked me whether I run any P2P apps and when I said yes, he didn’t really seem to care. shrug

    Why did you mention rickross.com, by the way? It looks like some kind of cultwatch page, is that correct? Or am I missing a joke?

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