It’s no secret that the IT world can be complex and confusing. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the jargon, acronyms, and conflicting opinions. But with these hacks, you’ll never have to worry about a new hacker taking over your company again!
These top 8 hacks are provided by IT experts who make mistakes every day. Here they share their stories at an information technology blog of some of the worst IT hacks in their careers.
- “The biggest fear for any IT company is the cloud,” says Colin, a network engineer. He recalls a time when he used a cloud server to keep track of high priority projects for his clients. But when he was forced to switch to a new cloud provider, something didn’t feel right. He started receiving strange messages that didn’t make sense and felt like the whole system was hacked. He took action immediately and asked all his clients to change their passwords immediately through an email but waited weeks without hearing from any of them. When he finally got in contact with them, they were confused about why they were being told to change their passwords. “One of my clients said, ‘Maybe the hacker changed the password when he was scanning the network’.” This is possibly what happened and Colin had to rework his entire system. He eventually discovered that there was a rootkit on his new cloud server that had corrupted the encryption keys used for passwords.
- Malicious software can be a real pain, especially if it spreads throughout your network like wildfire! For example, a client’s network suffered from a virus infection because of malicious software which spread from an unpatched workstation and infected the rest of their system. The system came down completely and immediately and everyone was left in dire need of patches for their operating systems. It took weeks to fix the network, as they had to wait for Windows patches. Months later, their telephone system still suffers from this infection.
- “I was once working with an external supplier in India on a project when a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack occurred in my network one night. The entire project was frozen for the day until we traced the source of this attack and fixed it,” says Adam, an IT professional. This is definitely not a good way to start off your new year! Adam saw what they thought was a mistake but it turned out to be a malicious DNS server which caused viruses throughout his network.
- A customer of John’s entered a room to find their server which they had been using for the last three years destroyed. “The disks took off and crashed into the wall,” John recalls. Unfortunately, he can’t remember who or what caused it but this is a scary hacker hack!
- One time, an IT consultant found themselves in a dangerous situation after working with a client who was trying to save money on IT by using pirated software and asking them to do the work for them.
- “I was once working with an external supplier in India on a project when a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack occurred in my network one night. The entire project was frozen for the day until we traced the source of this attack and fixed it,” says Adam, an IT professional. This is definitely not a good way to start off your new year! Adam saw what they though was a mistake but it turned out to be a malicious DNS server which caused viruses throughout his network.
- This one surprised me! A client installed software on their workstation from an unknown source and suddenly lost all their data and could no longer access them again! Luckily, John could recover them all for them. “It was a case of someone hacking into the server and somehow corrupting the drives,” he explains. It is not an uncommon problem to have when dealing with external suppliers, as well as pirated software. There are so many ways to get hacked today that your system can become infected from anywhere!
- “I worked for a company that was part of a consortium where all the partners had RAID5 arrays. One time, there was a crisis when one of the partners had experienced major downtime for weeks,” explains Michel, an IT consultant. They hadn’t been able to recover any data from their RAID array at all after multiple failed attempts by their technicians to diagnose the issue and repair it. It took days for them to recover all their data. This is a scary hack!