Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 March 30

= March 30 =

How to know if a hack is taking place?
How does a system administrator know whether a hack has occurred or is occurring? --78.148.110.69 (talk) 10:04, 30 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Sometimes with a Intrusion detection system. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 10:15, 30 March 2014 (UTC)
 * If the hacker is hacking the system while she's hacking the system, the sysadmin may notice a dancing koala. Or whatever's cool that day. Or just a crash. InedibleHulk (talk) 17:29, 30 March 2014 (UTC)
 * How do you know someone broke into your house? Sometimes the front door is smashed in and the place is ransacked, other times you might realize that an envelope full of money is missing from your top drawer, and have no idea how or even when it went missing. Vespine (talk) 23:04, 30 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Sometimes it's just dumb luck; once in '98 or so, for some reason I was looking at the root filesystem of eBay's database server -- intuition? -- and noticed a file that wasn't entirely familiar. I asked our sysadmin what the file was, and he said "oh shit" and basically pulled the plug...turned out we'd been hacked a couple weeks previously by a "do it because I can" sort of hacker. That forced some changes in eBay's security culture (or lack thereof.) --jpgordon:==( o ) 14:48, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Someone is always trying to hack your system. Personal computers with information that might be damaging if released or changed should never use email or web browsing even to internal servers - I suggest that financial controllers and HR for instance keep a separate PC for anything like that. As to the servers yep you need good intrusion detection systems and make certain there aren't any known bugs in the code one uses and be careful what one provides. Hackers are very ingenious and you most definitely don't want to be their low hanging fruit. Dmcq (talk) 14:27, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I think you mean, "Someone is always trying to hack a system" -- I don't think most individual PCs are currently being specifically targeted. But, in general, somebody is probably currently conducting surveillance that could identify a given system as having valuable resources or low security. My point is, even if someone is constantly driving around my neighborhood looking for unlocked doors, I wouldn't say "someone is always trying to break into my house" Subtle distinction, but important! SemanticMantis (talk) 15:21, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I'd go with "Someone is always trying to hack your computer". Grab yourself a copy of Wireshark or equivalent and look at the number of incoming request. There are a lot of people out there running scripts portscanning all addresses just to see if you have left any obvious things open. You will be unpleasantly surprised. For the most part your firewall will block all of these.--Salix alba (talk): 20:29, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I use to go onto my 2wire modem's firewall log and report all of the attempts to access port 22, 23, 25, 135, 139, 445, and 5900 as a way of killing time. On just a residential DSL network, I would see hundreds of failed attempts to hack in from IPs all over the world (but mostly North America and China for some reason). I would mostly see IPs from ISPs like Embarq, VerizonComcast, Road Runner, AT&T, and China Telecom, but every now and then there would be really interesting things like major corporations, government agencies, and universities trying to get in, probably because they had an infected machine within their network. 71.3.50.250 (talk) 04:24, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
 * They know there's a problem if they start getting notices from their company's internet service provider (or, in the case of a large company with their own IP space, SpamCop, other network administrators, and the general public) about spam or acceptable use policy violations. PCHS-NJROTC  (Messages) 20:02, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I started writing to say I agree with SemanticMantis, but the analogies I've thought of have actually convinced me otherwise:) The fishing analogy I think is the most clear, you could say to any salmon in the sea that someone is always trying to catch them, even though no single fisherman or fishing boat is specifically targeting that individual. What do you think? Vespine (talk) 22:39, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Lost horizontal scroll bar in Gmail
I use Gmail on Google Chrome on a Windows 7 PC. When I open up a message, it has a vertical and horizontal scroll bar initially. I then zoom (CTRL +) in to make the text larger, and the vertical scroll bar remains, but the horizontal scroll bar disappears, leaving me no way to see the right side of my messages. Is this a known bug ? Is there a fix ? StuRat (talk) 15:03, 30 March 2014 (UTC)