Of being hacked, found guilty of spam

A few days ago, my hosting company sent me an automated email notifying me that port 25 had been blocked on my personal server. Cause: It had been found guilty of sending spam. As I’m not (at least officially) in the spam business, this could only mean one thing: I got hacked.

I was shocked. If felt to me as though I was having a car accident.

The first think to do in such situations is to restrict to the bare minimum connections from the outside world to regain control of the machine. In my case, I rebooted the server to rescue mode with only SSH access. This means mail server downtime BUT SMTP protocol is reliable by design. Actually, it has been developed when Internet barely existed and mails where directly hosted on terminals with intermittent connexions. Hence, not an issue.