Tips from the Abuse Department: Save Your Sinking Ship
By Garrett White in Customer Service, SoftLayer, Tips and TricksI often find that the easiest way to present a complex process is with a relatable analogy. By replacing esoteric technical details with a less intimidating real-world illustration, smart people don’t have to be technically savvy to understand what’s going on. When it comes to explaining abuse-related topics, I find analogies especially helpful. One that I’m particularly keen on in explaining Abuse tickets in the context of a sinking ship.
How many times have you received an Abuse ticket and responded to the issue by suspending what appears to be the culprit account? You provide an update in the ticket, letting our team know that you’ve “taken care of the problem,” and you consider it resolved. A few moments later, the ticket is updated on our end, and an abuse administrator is asking follow-up questions: “How did the issue occur?” “What did you do to resolve the issue?” “What steps are being taken to secure the server in order to prevent further abuse?”
Who cares how the issue happened if it’s resolved now, right? Didn’t I respond quickly and address the problem in the ticket? What gives? Well, dear readers, it’s analogy time:
You don’t see evidence of the problem anymore, but as you continue along your way, your vessel might start riding lower and lower in the water — jeopardizing yourself and your shipment. If you were to search for the cause of the water intake and take steps to patch it, the boat would be in a much better condition to deliver you and your cargo safely to your destination.
In the same way that a hull breach can sink a ship, so too can a security hole on your server cause problems for your (and your clients’) data. In the last installment of “Tips from the Abuse Department,” Andrew explained some of the extremely common (and often overlooked) ways servers are compromised and used maliciously. As he mentioned in his post, Abuse tickets are, in many cases, the first notification for many of our customers that “something’s wrong.”
At a crucial point like this, it’s important to get the water out of the boat AND prevent the vessel from taking on any more water. You won’t be sailing smoothly unless both are done as quickly as possible.
Let’s look at an example of what thorough response to an Abuse ticket might look like:
After temporarily suspending the account to stop any further malware distribution, you log into the server and track down the file and what permissions it has. You look through access logs and discover that the file was uploaded via FTP just yesterday from an IP in another country. With this IP information, you search your logs and find several other instances where suspicious files were uploaded around the same time, and you see that several FTP brute force attempts were made against the server.
You know what happened: Someone (or something) scanned the server and attempted to break into the domain. When the server was breached, malware was uploaded to an obscure directory on the domain where the domain owners might not notice it.
With this information in hand, you can take steps to protect your clients and the server itself. The first step might be to implement a password policy that would make guessing passwords very difficult. Next, you might add a rule within your FTP configuration to block continued access after a certain number of failed logins. Finally, you would clean the malicious content from the server, reset the compromised passwords, and unsuspend the now-clean site.
While it’s quite a bit more work than simply identifying the domain and account responsible for the abuse and suspending it, the extra time you spent investigating the cause of the issue will prevent the same issue from happening after your client “fixes” the problem by deleting the files/directories. Invariably, they’d get compromised again in the same way when the domain is restored, and you’d hear from the Abuse department again.
Server security goes hand in hand with systems administration, and even though it’s not a very fun part of the job, it is a 24/7 responsibility that requires diligence and vigilance. By investing time and effort into securing your servers and fixing your hull breach rather than just bailing water overboard, your customers will see less downtime, you’ll be using your server resources more efficiently, and (best of all) you won’t have the Abuse team hounding you about more issues!
-Garrett
P.S. I came up with a brilliant analogy about DNS and the postal service, so that might be a topic for my next post …
