What security tools do we use?

Datacenters, Systems Administration, Web Hosting
Clamav
Clamav

 

What tools does Brownrice use to alert us to a compromised hosted web site or server?  Let me show you:

OSSEC: A great open source tool that constantly monitors server log files and file systems in real-time. OSSEC’s log monitoring helps with an important part of PCI Compliance, it can be configured to automatically block bad guys from doing bad things, and its a fantastic tool for post-mortem hack analysis.  We have OSSEC installed on all of our hosting servers, virtual servers, and managed customer servers.  It reports back to a mother-ship server so we can keep an eye on things from a central location.

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Remember rootkits?

Systems Administration, Web Hosting

Five years ago we were constantly fighting off hackers who would hack an insecure web site then try and install a rootkit so that they could own the server. Now? Nothing. They don’t even try and attack the server. We have all sorts of rootkit detection software on our servers (rkhunter, OSSEC, etc.) and I’m starting to wonder why we bother when a hacker has everything they need when they’ve compromise a web site.

Powder Day Bandwidth

Systems Administration

When you host Ski Area web cameras like we do, bandwidth goes big along with the storms. Here’s what one of our web cam streaming server’s bandwidth looks like over the last week.  And yes, its been snowing for exactly the last three days!  I’d wager we could write an algorithm that would determine ski area snow fall amounts by the amount of bandwidth that their web camera’s are using…

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The new Brownrice Data Center!

Systems Administration

Our existing server space is close to capacity so we’re building a bigger and more awesome-r one!

The new Brownrice data center will be larger, greener, and more secure than our existing server space and will utilize a smart, fresh air cooling system with air conditioning and generator backup, multiple layers of physical security, and will improve on our already robust physical network redundancy.

It will also look *super* cool.

So if you’ve been looking for a place to co-locate your servers or server racks, look no further than Brownrice. And feel free to come by anytime and we’ll give you a tour.

New Summit Cam!

Systems Administration

I LOVE when ski areas put our cameras in far away and cool places.  Red River Ski Area installed this one and its called “The Summit Cam.”  Check it out:

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WordPress hack post-mortem

Systems Administration, Web Hosting

Yesterday morning we had a client who’s got a site on a virtual server email to say:

Hi Oban –

I just had a business colleague say that he went to my site, got a malware warning, and his entire hard drive was wiped out instantly.
Hard drive instantly wiped out instantly?!?  Pa-leeease!
Nonetheless, this is a WordPress site so Dave looked through the code and didn’t see anything immediately out of line.  We both visited the customer’s site and neither of our hard drives were instantly wiped out (we are craaazy risk takers!)   I also looked at what Google’s Safe Browsing site currently thought of our network – which was that everyone was clean a whistle.
Dave emailed the client to say that this sounded like a false alarm but to keep us posted.   I decided to run the site through Sucuri.net’s free site scan and bingo! a javascript exploit was found.