evilstevie @evilstevie@mastod1.ddns.net

Daughter just came home to tell me the teachers at school tried to confiscate her vape but they couldn't because it's actually a kazoo.

"I made a kazoo noise at them and I could see them dying on the inside so I made a sad kazoo noise instead. I don't think it helped."

The grin on her face.

A few days ago, a client’s data center (well, actually a server room) "vanished" overnight. My monitoring showed that all devices were unreachable. Not even the ISP routers responded, so I assumed a sudden connectivity drop. The strange part? Not even via 4G.

I then suspected a power failure, but the UPS should have sent an alert.

The office was closed for the holidays, but I contacted the IT manager anyway. He was home sick with a serious family issue, but he got moving.

To make a long story short: the company deals in gold and precious metals. They have an underground bunker with two-meter thick walls. They were targeted by a professional gang. They used a tactic seen in similar hits: they identify the main power line, tamper with it at night, and send a massive voltage spike through it.

The goal is to fry all alarm and surveillance systems. Even if battery-backed, they rarely survive a surge like that. Thieves count on the fact that during holidays, owners are away and fried systems can't send alerts. Monitoring companies often have reduced staff and might not notice the "silence" immediately.

That is exactly what happened here. But there is a "but": they didn't account for my Uptime Kuma instance monitoring their MikroTik router, installed just weeks ago. Since it is an external check, it flagged the lack of response from all IPs without needing an internal alert to be triggered from the inside.

The team rushed to the site and found the mess. Luckily, they found an emergency electrical crew to bypass the damage and restore the cameras and alarms. They swapped the fried server UPS with a spare and everything came back up.

The police warned that the chances of the crew returning the next night to "finish" the job were high, though seeing the systems back online would likely make them move on. They also warned that thieves sometimes break in just to destroy servers to wipe any video evidence.

Nothing happened in the end. But in the meantime, I had to sync all their data off-site (thankfully they have dual 1Gbps FTTH), set up an emergency cluster, and ensure everything was redundant.

Never rely only on internal monitoring. Never.

#IT #SysAdmin #HorrorStories #ITHorrorStories #Monitoring

#NotToBrag #followers #medieval #popularity

New stickers came in! Well in time for @eth0 😈

At long last, I have created the Torment Nexus sticker from the obscure Don't Create the Torment Nexus meme

Maybe today

LOL wonder if there's any connection between our local ham club adding an AI agent today and it being down...

Can’t Live Without You*
Caveat Frog

Well that's no fun.

"Allow 'Google Chrome' to find devices on local networks?"

This prompt is singularly irritating. There is no indication of what causes it to pop. There is absolutely no way a normal user will be able to answer this intelligently.

Is it an indicator of an attack that was just blocked? If I say yes do I immediately get CSRF'ed?

UX is security, people. C'mon.

For more (I think): https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access

397) Birbbot. Entice birds to your bird table with this convincing facsimile of an avian pal. #SmallRobotsRemastered

Mustn't disturb the baby

Well, Holiday Inn is off the list when I’m on tour

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/inhumane-homeless-people-turned-away-33179421.amp #hotel #homelessness

Sources say he is doing bad things with machines again