Why Protect your Server?
SoR was hacked early 2009. Cleaning out the hack, figuring out why it happened, and hardening the SoR server to keep it from happening again wasted a full week of labor. It exposed visitors of my site to spam redirects and a trojan virus. It also potentially opened me up to full site deletion, password theft, database corruption, being blocked by search engines for malware distribution, and a host of more bad-ness I don't want to clue hackers into.
I can never be 100% sure, but evidence leads to my server control panel that had a known security hole. From there, the hacker gained ftp access to my site, and then ran a whole list of bad scripts. Was it my fault? Well, there was a whole host of things I *should* have done since day one to harden my server that most likely would have blocked the hacker. This article is to share what I learned the hard way.
Now I know what you are thinking, because I thought it too: "I'm a noob at web security and don't want to spend years studying web security to defend myself. My website is about [insert non-IT interest here], not IT related!" This website is about making robotics - I'd rather spend years studying robots, not defending myself against fat loser hackers who still live in their parents basement and can't get a real job (rant rant rant).
So this page is how to defend yourself against 95% of all hacks on your site, and to help you protect yourself from your nobleness.
SoR was hacked early 2009. Cleaning out the hack, figuring out why it happened, and hardening the SoR server to keep it from happening again wasted a full week of labor. It exposed visitors of my site to spam redirects and a trojan virus. It also potentially opened me up to full site deletion, password theft, database corruption, being blocked by search engines for malware distribution, and a host of more bad-ness I don't want to clue hackers into.
I can never be 100% sure, but evidence leads to my server control panel that had a known security hole. From there, the hacker gained ftp access to my site, and then ran a whole list of bad scripts. Was it my fault? Well, there was a whole host of things I *should* have done since day one to harden my server that most likely would have blocked the hacker. This article is to share what I learned the hard way.
Now I know what you are thinking, because I thought it too: "I'm a noob at web security and don't want to spend years studying web security to defend myself. My website is about [insert non-IT interest here], not IT related!" This website is about making robotics - I'd rather spend years studying robots, not defending myself against fat loser hackers who still live in their parents basement and can't get a real job (rant rant rant).
So this page is how to defend yourself against 95% of all hacks on your site, and to help you protect yourself from your nobleness.