Section 10.8 Take a Few Cents off the Top

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10.8 Take a Few Cents off the Top

People in the financial community know that the stealthy cracker will not heist $100,000 from an account. Instead he will arrange to get a fraction of a cent from each of a million transactions. It is popular to do this with transactions where interest is involved because it is unlikely for people to know that the calculation is incorrect.

The lesson for the Linux System Administrator is to not only be alert for the blatant cracker who trashed the disk or used up bandwidth, but also be aware of the stealth cracker who has gained root access and has not caused any harm so far.

Although some crackers merely break into systems to do it and will not cause harm, there also is the danger that a cracker is accumulating systems for a later DDoS or worse activity that will "finger" your system as the point of origin. The cracker also might be scanning for confidential data that will be used for some nefarious purpose to the harm of your users and organization.

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