A common preconception about network security is that as long as the firewall is working and preventing all unauthorized access to internal devices (that’s incoming traffic) - then the firewall is doing its job. However this often isn’t the case and a number of recent attacks have proved this. This misconception is held amongst many sys admins and their IT managers, who often turn their back on security news with the idea that they have a firewall; they are protected.

The other day I noticed something weird when I performed the command “ls -l”. Bash was reporting some strange output and the first thing I did was throw it into Google…. which revealed one thing; my Linux box had been comprised. Freaked out at first, I started researching everything I could; I was already aware [...]