1.1. Real-Life Incidents

Contrary to public perceptions, not all incidents have dramatic dollar losses or make the front page news in sensational stories of computer terrorists wreaking havoc around the cyber world. Rather, most incidents rarely get a passing glance from even the most investigative reporter, and are often rather mundane and uninteresting for people outside of the affected area or company. As this book is not sensational and does not make unrealistic claims of gloom and doom, let's look at some typical situations that incident responders deal with on an almost-daily basis.

One case occurred a few years ago at a major university's (University X) primary computer lab. Apparently out of the blue, the 25-plus Unix workstations in the lab started crashing one by one in rapid succession, until each of the monitors had a single message on its display: "Kernel panic, core dump." Fortunately, these high-end Unix systems recognized that there was a problem and began to reset and reboot themselves to correct the problem.