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Hacking Report For Our IBM i - 2013 in Review

By Rich Loeber

In January of 2013 year, we issued our first Hacking Report for our IBM i system. At that time, I promised to publish additional reports of what we are seeing on this test server. This is our final report for the 2013 and I want to wrap of this one year experiment with our fourth quarter results and some observations about the entire year.

During the final three month period for 2013 we observed a hacking results that were remarkably consistent with the three previous quarters. The bulk of hacking attempts mounted against our test server were once again in the area of FTP Signon and Telnet Signon.

Once again, someone knocked on the door of our test server 14 times a day trying to gain access. This attack rate was remarkably consistent for the entire year.

Some interesting things to note ....

Thanks to our SafeNet/i exit point control software, we successfully thwarted 847 attempts to gain access via FTP and another 428 attempts to get a Telnet signon session during the final quarter of the year. For the year, we was almost 4000 FTP hack attempts and just under 2000 Telnet tries. The take home lesson is that you absolutely must take life on the Internet seriously. Our server is small potatoes and does not have any high value assets on it, but hackers are there knocking at the door on a regular basis anyway. I think it is just because it is there and they have been unsuccessful.

Brute force FTP attacks continued during the final quarter. Once again, the profile named ADMINSTRA was the most popular one used. In fact, this was true for each quarter during the year. Other profile names used included ADMIN, REMOTE, SCANNER, SYS, BACKUPEXEC and WWW-DATA. Once again, and this was consistent during the whole year, none of the typical Q profiles were attempted.

We also continue to see certain IP addresses with repeated access attempts. The leading violator for the final quarter traced back to The RIPE network in The Netherlands. The next two highest both traced back to the Asia Pacific Network Information Center in Australia.

For the full year, our server posted close to 1 million network transactions. This is nothing in today's computing environment, some of our customer's servers can record that level of activity in just a few minutes. But, taken as a whole for the year, 0.5% of those network access attempts were not authorized by us. Hackers, you have to take them seriously. Failure to do so will get you in the headlines as the next Target.

This will conclude our year of tracking hacker activity on our server. If you have questions about details of the report, feel free to contact me directly by email (rich at kisco.com).