I know I promised a review of some Flipbook solutions, but I’ve been otherwise occupied the last few weeks. Since it’s been a long time that I’ve added a “journal post” – a post where I just whine about all things that go wrong during my job – I thought I’d share this juicy story.
Yesterday, out of nowhere, our “Internet” started to act up. Any site we tried to visit ended up throwing error pages at us. At first, I assumed it was a DNS problem. We have had problems with a server in the past; where the DNS service had to be restarted every few days.
But not this time. Our new SBS 2008 server was behaving excellently for internal resolving. The final test was visiting our ISA Server; to check it’s connection verifiers. They all failed to connect to the five websites I’ve registered. So, I could rule out a DNS problem.
So, my next guess was that our ISP was having issues. We tried to call them; and they were “going to check it out”; but never called us back. When our internet connection was back to it’s superfast self around 4 PM we assumed the ISP had fixed the issue.
I was wrong. The next day, the problem returned. We contacted our ISP again, who did some more tests. They then told us that “one of our computers was broadcastin excessively”. Well shucks. I fired up the ISA management Console again; and queried for outgoing traffic. I saw one internal IP adress show up constantly; and located the machine.
One of our “sales people” (I use the term lightly, because she fails at the selling part) has a laptop; and that laptop was going batshit insane. Every second, there were 30 outgoing connections across different ports. I called Trojan, and took a drastic step. After consulting management, I changed the ISA rule set to discard ANY outgoing request from the laptop.
Literally one minute later, the “internet speed” was normal again. I slayed the beast!
Of course, management wasn’t pleased. It was the second laptop she “ruined” in a month, and we can only suspect what she’s done to the darn thing. The second I took it to my desk to test it, it started to malfunction.
Needless to say, her “laptop privelegdges” have been taken from her. Serves her right, for trying to steal our internet. Users truly are the single greatest threat to your network security!