In my endless quest to essentially create a Cisco Firepower firewall for poor people, I found a bit of a gap in the open source security ecosystem. While we have great tools for detecting malicious network traffic patterns, we don’t have easy ways of detecting malicious files in transit. So, a bit of fiddling around later, and I have a fairly basic system for integrating Suricata’s ‘filestore’ functionality with ClamAV’s real time scanning, thereby producing a log containing the source and destination addresses of any malicious files detected.

The idea of this setup is to protect the Small Systems as well as we protect the Big Systems. This solution uses a proven stack to protect webservers from modern threats. Using OSSEC, Suricata, and the built-in firewall capabilities of a modern Linux system it is possible to build a low maintenance and stable threat protection platform with relatively low performance impacts. It’s been specifically designed to be simple. The idea is that it will keep you on a ‘need to know basis’ and otherwise stay quiet and do it’s job.

Today, I got an email inquiring about a job opportunity. This was immediately pretty funny, since I don’t employ anybody including myself. Even better, the guy sent a Microsoft Excel file as the ‘resume’, so even if I was hiring… Sorry bud, not going to be you. Now normally I just delete these documents and report spam. But seeing as how I’m locked into my house and have nothing better to do right now, I figured I might as well have some fun with this.

For many years we’ve taken for granted the ability to settle any argument with Wikipedia. For so long, we’ve been able to settle any trivial dispute with a simple text search. That could change. I’m not really trying to fear-monger, but it’s always possible that the internet might go out and stay out. And like hell I’m going to sit in quarantine with my partner and not be able to settle up with Wikipedia!

On the 19th of January 2020, a malicious actor launched an attack against my home infrastructure. At 42 minutes after midnight a device located in Buenos Aires, Argentina began attacking my proxy server. For the next six minutes, approximately 150 malicious HTTP requests were made. Fortunately, every single one of these requests was met with a HTTP/400 response, that’s because I don’t use Apache Struts 2 which this bot was attempting to exploit.