The Nightmare After Christmas

Thursday, December 25, 2014 · 1 min read

‘Twas the night after Christmas in the Clause house,
And all you could hear was the click of a mouse,
Or the drop of a pin, or the sneeze of a louse,
Until he called out for his dear spouse.

“Mrs. Clause,” he cried, “I think it’s broken!”
“What?” she bellowed, annoyed to be woken.
“I’m locked out,” he said, regretting having spoken,
“I seem to have lost my login token.”

“Well, I did tell you your site’s a mess.”
“I have a weak password,” Santa confessed.
“I bet some crackers just made a good guess.”
“Perhaps we can track down their IP address?”

So Mrs. Clause began looking through logs,
While Santa whipped up some nice thick grog,
And soon enough, she found the clog:
“Who writes a database in Prolog?!”

“It looks like a simple DoS to me”
“Crudely done, from what I can see.”
“Seems like they stole your API keys.”
“Tracking these guys should be a breeze.”

So Santa called up an Elf for assistance,
(A big, macho creature known for his persistence)
He had ten years of UNIX experience,
And agreed to help on Santa’s insistence.

He fixed the firewall and flushed the cache,
And began to explore the system with Bash.
“Gosh, Santa, your code is trash,
Why are you using an md5 hash?”

So he patched the server (and ran git commit)
and did some digging and found the culprit.
Then he accessed the Naughty List with a rootkit,
And typed the name and hit “submit”.

He shutdown the computer and turned off the light,
Knowing that two wrongs might just make a right,
Yet he could not resist shouting, as he fled out of sight:
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

Happy holidays from Comfortably Numbered.