On getting cracked and recovering with NMAP
Call it baud karma. Call it carelessness. Call it inevitable. I was 0wn3d and didn't know it. After downloading and installing BETA 21 of version 2.54 of NMAP (and its graphical frontend), I su'd to root, fired it up, and aimed a FIN stealth scan at ports 1-32000 on my server. I was running portsentry on the server, but my desktop machine -- the one I was running NMAP on -- was on the portsentry ignore list so that it wouldn't simply reroute my inquisitive packets to /dev/null after I hit the first protected port.
The link for this article located at LinuxWorld is no longer available.