“This is the fifth part of the story of a community network that
was cracked and what was done to recover from it. The first part
Cracked! Part1: Denial and truth details the report that leads to
the discovery that the community network was indeed cracked and
some of the initial reactions. The second article Cracked! Part 2:
Watching and Waiting talks about how they learned more about the
cracker and what they did next. The third Cracked! Part 3: Hunting
the hunter talks about some of the efforts made to track down the
cracker and some surprises. The fourth Cracked! Part 4: The Sniffer
tells how they found the sniffer that the cracker was running on
their network and what they did next. This article covers the
rebuilding of the system to recover from the crack and fix some
long standing problems. Future articles detail their conversations
with the cracker on IRC, the hole they missed and the crackers
revenge.”
“By this point we have realized that we must get the cracker
off of our machines before it is to late. It is only a matter of
time before he trashes our system to clean up his tracks, gets a
sniffer running under a different architecture or uses us to launch
some denial of service attack. The FBI have not delivered
anything even though they always sound positive about the situation
whenever we talk to them. The next step is up to us.”
“There are pros and cons involved in attempting a rebuild. First
on the pro side we will have the opportunity to set things up in a
planned manner, not the randomness caused by the equipment slowly
coming in as it was donated. We will be able to get all of the
machines running a newer version of their operating systems and the
machines of the same architecture will be running the same versions
of the operating system. On the negative side it will be a lot of
work (remember I was a volunteer) more than I can do in my spare
time so I will have to take off from work. Other people will also
have to take off work. There is the chance that we will do all of
this and the cracker will still be able to crack us bringing us
most of the way back to were we started from except that he will
know that we know about him, and there is the chance that we will
tip our hand and the cracker will destroy things to cover up his
tracks before we can lock him out.”