evilrouters.net

I’d love to give credit for this because it’s awesome, but I have no idea where it originated.

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the LAN
No malware was stirring, not even LoveSan;
The firewalls were racked by the router with care,
In hopes that no hacker soon would be there;

The users were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of emails danced in their heads;
And me with my MacBook, and fresh packet cap,
Had just settled down for a long winter's nap,

When out from the pager there arose such a clatter,
I sprang to my desk to see what was the matter.
Away to the browser I flew like a flash,
Came through the VPN and refreshed the cache.

The sign on the certificate gave me to know
The session was safe, so I opened it - Lo!
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature email, and in text that was clear,

With a new device driver, with a quick "ho ho ho",
I knew in a moment it was our CSO.
More rapid than eagles his memos they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;

"Now, firewall! now, filter! now, intrusion detection!
On, event correlation! deep packet inspection!
Build layered defense! to the top of the wall!
Now block away! block away! block away all!"

As alarms that before the wild network worm fly,
When they meet with my console, mount up to the sky,
So up to the network the sensors they flew,
With the rack full of gear, and the CSO too.

And then, with a twinkling, I heard on my cell
The custom ring-tone - the network was well.
As I drew in my hand, and was turning around,
Down to my inbox he came with a bound.

His message was brief, what was afoot?
Were servers and systems safe at the root?
A bundle of appliances stacked on his rack,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

Their lights -- how they twinkled! Their vendors - how merry!
They stopped all attacks, they paged my BlackBerry!
The poor little hackers were drawn up like a bow,
And tied up in knots in the honeypot below;

The stump of net packets held tight in our teeth,
With logs all analyzed, traceroutes were a breeze;
Our policies sound, vulnerabilities patched,
Our security systems just could not be matched.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his audit,
tested the firewalls; then turned to report it,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up our T3 he rose;

He sprang to his limo, gave his consultants a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
"HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!"

To whomever wrote this, thank you. Excellent piece.

If you were to e-mail me over the holidays, you’d get a response like this. Unfortunately, I had to “tone it down” a bit (couldn’t make it as funny as I would have liked). =)

---------- Original message ----------
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:35:03 -0500
From: Jeremy L. Gaddis
Subject: Out of Office AutoReply:

[This message was generated by an automated system.]

Greetings and salutations!

I am out of the office and my current whereabouts are unknown.  Even I do not know
where I am.  I am not *really* on vacation (as in, I'm not really going anywhere far away),
but as far as responding to email is concerned, I appear to be well outside the solar system.

Other than December 29-30, I will not be around until January 5th.

Boiler plate:  If you have any special needs, please contact the Help Desk.  They will have
the tools and skills needed to get you back on track.

If you are the Help Desk, then please contact Kevin or Ben.

If you *ARE* Kevin or Ben:  stop, take a deep breath, and reassess things.  If you are still
hyperventilating, then go ahead and break the glass (a.k.a. call my Blackberry)!

Happy holidays!

"A" is for Arrogance, properly done.
"B" is for Bastard, the New Zealand one.
"C" is for Cynic, jaded and tired;
    it's also for Caffeine, which keeps us all wired.
"D" for Delete, we'll do it to you;
"E" for 31337, the skr1pt-k1ddie's due.
"F" is for Format(1M), we use it on disks,
"G" is the middle name of the guy who does RISKS.
"H" for the Hubris that makes lusers luse;
"I"'m the Important one, the person who su(8)'s.
"J" is for Jaded, see "C" above;
"K" is for Kill(1), a command we all love.
"L" is for Luser, the sysadmin's bane,
"M" with a "4" keeps the mail gurus sane.
"N" is for No, whatever the question,
"O" is for Octal, the way of permissions.
"P" is for Password, have you changed yours lately?
"Q" is for Quotas, which simplify greatly.
"R" is for Random, a most useful quality,
"S" I can't tell you, it's against policy.
"T" is for TECO, a very old editor,
"U" is for Unix, which has no competitor.
"V" is the System whose Release 4 we wrestle with,
"W" is for W(1), to see who(1) we nestle with.
"X" is the windowing system from Hell,
"Y" do we use it?  The rest suck as well!
"Z" is for Zero, indicating success
    It terminates programs -- and alphabets, yes.

–Unknown

So this evening I’m minding my own business with a friend at a downtown location when a woman I met one night recently saw me and launched into a pitch that began with the most unusual opening line:

HER:  "JEREMY!  Hi, it's Gwen!  Remember?  I called you last week on your cell
phone and you said 'How did you get this number?' and hung up on me?"

ME:  "Um, oh, yeah.  I do remember."

HER:  "Yeah.  Well, anyway, I wanted to know..."

P.S. It didn’t go so well for her this time either.