After going to my first DEFCON, I am super paranoid about getting hacked. Come on...After going to this conference it seems to me that everything can and will be hacked. This threat came in the form of dead.letter.

The Situation

Even though I love reading every security blog that I can find, I got tired of checking every single blog every day! With blogs like the googleprojectzeroday only posting once every couple of weeks, it made sense. So, I created a piece of software that automates this process of checking the blogs then sends me an email about my updated blogs of the day! I currently have an easy to use CLI to add, remove and format the definition of 'updated'. Anyone who wants to use the script can find it at https://github.com/mdulin2/security-blog-updates. I find it very useful and I hope everyone else does.

Dead In The Water

This morning, I checked my email box to see that my automatic morning email had not been sent for my blogs. So, I checked my server to see what had happened. However, I found something that was terrifying; a file, that I had not created called dead.letter.

Crazy thoughts started running through my mind! Who would want to hack me? How did they get in? Why did I not make this more secure? What a clever name... Dead.letter; probably telling me I am dead in the water, holding my website ransom! So, after a while, I decided it was best to look into what the damage was. But, all the letter said was "UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 13: ordinal not in range(128)".

At that point, I realized that my code had a mistake in it! Yipeee! My site had not been hijacked; dead.letter was just a log for sending email with SMTP. The error was caused by my script writing to a file with the current unicode encoding, without converting to a ascii character set for the text file. This ending up being a trivial fix.

Conclusion

You are likely not being hacked, most of the time. However, it is good to be cautious! In the era of Ransomware and botnets, every computer has a large price tag on it. I also learned what dead.letter was today; I can guarantee that I will never forget what it is either.