Sunline Hacker Removal
We have to scrape some hackers off the bottom of our shoes. Well, actually we have to scrape them off the Sunline server. But the idea is the same. And we want to do a very thorough job, before we walk on the carpet. Or restart Sunline.
Yes. We’ll have to bring the Sunline server down to do this right. The traces we’ve seen suggest that the hackers are amateurs who have used tools that someone else designed in order to break into our system. But those tools may have given them the ability to build secret back doors into our server that we have not found. So, we need to treat them as a serious threat.
That means bringing the Sunline server down and reloading its Operating System (OS) from a CD, then rebuilding all of the file structure that allows Sunline to work.It will be an all day job. And it will affect your use of SIP, HIP, and RPA as well.
Our first target date is this Thursday (July 5), with a fallback date of next Thursday (July 12). (The Sunline Directors were clear that Thursday was the best day of the week to do this.)
We’re between the rock and hard place of wanting to do this as soon as possible and needing to have a complete set of resources to do it. Plus a guy at SirsiDynix to do the really hard stuff.
I apologize for the short notice (if we do this on July 5), and I regret having to do this at all. I’m beginning to think that the penalty for hacking ought to include the words “lethal injection”.
–Al Carlson