Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker, Second Edition

Chapter 17. The Taking of Clark

	And then Something went bump! How that bump made us jump! The Cat in the Hat
	--DR. SEUSS

Most people don’t know when their computers have been hacked. Most systems lack the logging and the attention needed to detect an attempted invasion, much less a successful one. Josh Quittner [Quittner and Slatalla, 1995] tells of a hacker who was caught, convicted, and served his time. When he got out of jail, many of the old back doors he had left in hacked systems were still there.

We had a computer that was hacked, but the intended results weren’t subtle. In fact, the attackers’ goals were to embarrass our company, and they nearly succeeded.

Often, management fears corporate embarrassment more than the actual loss of data. It ...