Pop-up Kiwi CERT a shepherd for helpless hacked SMB flock New Zealand will get its first national computer security incident response team (CSIRT) helping to assist underserved hacked small businesses, should a funding effort be successful. If the money rains, at least two professional security consultants and possibly some graduate students will work over a year to assess what is …
Last year sometime my servers weathered an attack that was sustained for some days. Could not get any local help.
Local ISP's (especially looking at you, ISP formerly known as "Telecom", who you let so many of your customers be part of a DDOS type attack and did NOT ONE THING to stop, lessen or mitigate the problem!) who had IP's in the attack would not help. Could get no help from Government types who you would think would be willing to at least try. No one seemed interested.
Comcast and Amazon actually responded quite well (I am sure some who read this would claim I am lying given the opinions I've read about Comcast), as did all the other overseas ISP's I contacted. They wouldn't divulge the actions they took but stuff from their IP's stopped shortly after I contacted them.
Not a peep from any one in NZ who could help.
I'm grateful to the authors of Denyhosts and Fail2ban as those two bits of software probably significantly helped mitigate the load, probably should be thankful to the NZ ISPs (again especially looking at Telecom or their offshoot "Chorus") as the pitiful NZ internet speeds would've kept the attack low. Obviously grateful to all those behind Linux as I'm sure if I ran a Non-NIX based server it would've fallen the first time someone sniffed in it's general direction. And much gratitude is owed to all the writers of the various other bits of security software there.
And I am truly grateful to God as our email and web servers (located in different places and different ISPs) survived the storm with some slow-down but no downtime (although foggy memory.. I may've shut them down for a few hours during the peak of the storm)
I'm a SMB owner. I have work to do to keep my business going, I don't have time to closely monitor the servers to make sure nothing is getting through. Nice that we're finally getting something local to help.
(Oh, I am grateful to those behind the attack as well - seeing what my machines weathered then I am much more relaxed today, and I learnt a lot more about making sure things are hardened and backups couldn't be tampered with!)
Hmm... the NZ Internet Task Force has been handling incidents as best it could. But you can blame the nice bloke with the smiley face who lives in Parnell, and his boss Mr Joyce, for the lack of guvmunt interest in resourcing real problem areas like this one. There are so many more vote-catching things to work on.
See it the country over.. All sorts of things that really could help people out that are completely ignored..
Much they could do with motorcyclist safety - some simply ideas (a mate down Wellington way has some great ones on that, and there's the Megarider guys over in Masterton), but they whack up the registration prices instead.. There's stuff with housing, and the whole shambles with quakes in Christchurch (was I the only one to notice something of a correlation between Brownlee visiting CC and them having another round of aftershocks?)
And so many other places they could improve.
But they don't get immediate votes or put money in the hands of Shonkey's rich chums...
(Ok.. Spot the guy who hates national almost as much as MS, for almost the same reasons!)
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