The One With The Night-Out At Office!

Once upon a lazy afternoon, two coders, Shan and Lav, were having a really dull and unexciting day.

Until a really important phone-call came along.

It was from the Appointy’s team. They were informed that the company’s website was being attacked and that it was a great opportunity for them to learn about real-time hacking.

When they reached the workplace at around 7:30 in the evening, nothing really seemed out of place except for the presence of the entire team at that hour of the day. They learned that the attack was done a few hours ago and had ended recently. It was diagnosed about an hour ago, and since then the team has been removing bugs to make the website more secure.

But to actually make their website more secure, they had to think by putting themselves in the shoes of the hacker. So the team decided to put their own hackers at work. That’s where Shan and Lav stepped in.

So, our two young hackers were given powerful tools with a step by step process of how to use those tools. They were taught how to launch the attack.

Sounds fun?

After that, as soon as they launched the attack, the Core team would locate the bugs and fix them there and then. So for each attack that Shan and Lav triggered, the Appointy’s website was becoming more and more hack-resistant.

The Process

First of all, they analysed the logs using tools like log parser so that the root cause could be found. Subsequently, they found the IP addresses of the top suspects which were doing suspicious activities. By that, it seemed to be a DOS attack.

Then a replica of the attack was created. Using stress testing tools they started attacking the server but server couldn’t be brought down while on the same level of attack. It confirmed that it was not a DOS attack. So the next step was to check system performance. A performance monitor tool was used to check the memory usage and page fault in the system.

After that, the team fixed some memory leak issues.  Finally, they used a log manager ELMAH to point the most common errors faced by the customers. An analysis of the logs was done and the issues were given to the team to be fixed.

Conclusion

Working with the Appointy team hand-in-hand gave Shan and Lav, a feeling of self-importance. Being a part of something real and huge, they learnt the entire process while having fun.

And above all, there was a sense of pride, every time they were congratulated and appreciated for their work. Along with all the experience from that night, the knowledge they gained will be with them forever.

And of course, the assured bonuses too!