Can't access 3100 appliance
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@cdsJerry said in Can't access 3100 appliance - hacked:
This morning I can't log into the GUI even from outside. And when I try to connect via SSH it tells me my password is invalid. I did a copy/paste from my password manager software. I'm using the correct password.
Do you mean by "... can't log into the GUI even from outside." that you have the firewall GUI available on the WAN port? If you do, and you don't have a VPN in place, then almost certainly your system could have been severely compromised.
Take the firewall out of service for a moment, restore to factory defaults and then import your last known good backup. Do all this initially connected with just the serial console cable.
Next, plug a laptop or a local PC directly into the LAN port, give the PC an IP address within the LAN port subnet (if necessary), and see if you can login. Things may be very slow because the GUI will be trying to contact the pfSense update servers to check for the latest firmware. Even still, this will let you verify your passwords are good.
Once in, then connect the WAN connection and see how things go from there.
Your description really sounds like a badly hosed configuration. And are you sure that someone has not put another device on the network that has the IP address of the firewall? That could cause the issues you are seeing.
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@bmeeks said in Can't access 3100 appliance - hacked:
Do all this initially connected with just the serial console cable.
My pfSense is configured in pass-through mode. The GUI has to sit on the public IP as there is no LAN IP in pass through mode. The configuration was done with Netgate support so I'm pretty confident it was configured correctly and that's the backup I've been restoring to. There are multiple WAN IPs that pass through the system on their way to various servers. There is a second firewall between the public IPs and our internal network so this first pfSense unit is just limiting and cleaning traffic that's headed for the servers. Again, I'm pretty confident in it's configuration. I can't explain it's recent behavior unless and update changed something.
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@cdsJerry Do you have antivirus in place to prevent keyloggers and such being installed on your public servers? Connections to the FTP from an inside computer normally not expected I would also find concerning. At one time we found a repository of German DVD rips on our main (inside) file server because of a lousy password policy on some test accounts (not admin/admin, but just as bad) accessed through our Citrix web access. Maybe someone got a phishing email or brought in a compromised flash drive. In my experience I've found the simply baffling problems generally caused by malware. I might first check with your users who have the auth to manage your virtual environment. Sounds like an admin's creds got out.
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@provels We do run antivirus as well as malware and other detection software. I re-ran everything manually and didn't find anything.
Indeed some of the FTP accounts use some pretty lousy passwords but at the same time they're limited to single directories which are usually emptied as we complete jobs. I checked every directory on the server (that took a while) and they are all empty. Actually I went a step further and shut down the FTP server. We find it's not used much any more since there are so many file-share services from Google, Dropbox, etc. and people understand them better than FTP. I think it's been months since someone actually used FTP to send us files, so I shut it down.
I'm always amazed that people have FTP servers out there where a folder had both read and write permissions with public access. They're just waiting to become porn storage.
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@cdsJerry said in Can't access 3100 appliance - hacked:
@bmeeks said in Can't access 3100 appliance - hacked:
Do all this initially connected with just the serial console cable.
My pfSense is configured in pass-through mode. The GUI has to sit on the public IP as there is no LAN IP in pass through mode. The configuration was done with Netgate support so I'm pretty confident it was configured correctly and that's the backup I've been restoring to.
It might be time to pay Netgate Support again and open a case directly with them. Might take some effort to provide them some method of remote access to the firewall appliance itself. Maybe use one of the available Windows remote desktop web platforms to give Netgate Support access to a Windows PC where the SG-3100 is connected to it locally via the console cable.
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@bmeeks I know how to give them direct access, well, when anyone has access, which seems to be for only a while after a reboot. It's all about the money at this point as our business is selling CDs, DVDs, SD cards, and USB drives. The CD/DVD side just isn't the hot ticket it once was so the purse strings are incredibly tight.
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if you have the WAN and LAN bridged and only a public IP on the firewall you will, as you say, have to use that IP to access it but that doesn't mean it needs to be open to the internet. You can still set firewall rules to restrict access to the webgui or ssh to internal clients or known external IPs only.
Steve
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@stephenw10 I agree with the firewall to restrict access to the GUI, and I think my rules are already set for exactly that. But my current problem is that I can't access the GUI myself so I can't get in to even verify that. And if it wasn't set, why would I have access for 15 or so min. after the reboot? I didn't have this issue before the reload so the settings shouldn't have changed.
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15mins is suspiciously like an ARP timeout. Maybe you have some IP conflict and something else is responding to ARP when it times out breaking your connection.
If you are inadvertently connecting to something else that might explain why your password seems to stop working.
The SSH key would be different though, the SSH client should warn you about that when you try to connect.If you restart php and the webgui at the console (menu options 16+11) do you get connectivity back?
Steve
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@stephenw10 I haven't connected since Friday but when I went to it today, it connected just fine. I've been logged on for over 30 min. now. I can move around all the menus and options normally. It loads fast. I can make changes.
However, if I make a change and hit save it stalls out saying it's sending request. But if I then click off to another menu and come back, the change has been saved. And I can't access the Dashboard at all. It just says Waiting for xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx... but never loads. Not sure if this is related to the same issue or if this should be a new thread.
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@stephenw10 I left it trying to load that page and came back later. The page had loaded at some point so I went off of that page to another page then back to the Dashboard. It's still trying to load the Dashboard again.
I also see it loaded a new version about 45 min. ago.
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That sounds more like a general connectivity issue. When you go to the dashboard depending on which widgets you have there, it reaches out to check several things on the internet, the firmware update check for example.
If it cannot connect to those they have to timeout. The dash will be much slower to load in that situation than other pages.
If you have ACB configured then it tries to save a backup everytime you make any chnage to the firewall and that can be a problem if there is no connectivity.
Make sure all your configured DNS servers are responding in Diag > DNS Lookup.
Make sure it can ping out in Diag > Ping.Steve
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@stephenw10 The page loaded instantly this morning. I went to the Diag > DNS Lookup and did some lookups. They came back with 6-11ms return times. I'm on fiber and haven't seen any connectivity issues on any of the servers.
Yesterday when I'd try to load the Dashboard and it would eventually complete, it showed the "Netgate Services and Support" as just a spinning star as if it was trying to get an update. Today it loads with the rest of the page so that's different. I didn't make any changes however.
Today it appears to be running fine.
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Mmm, some IP conflict would tie in with that if whatever device it was has now been removed or given a new IP.
I would expect to see something logged in pfSense reporting another device using the same IP though.
Steve
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@stephenw10 And these are all fixed IPs and no changes to any of them during this time.
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I think you should edit the subject of your first post to remove the word "hacked".
pfSense+ 23.09 Lenovo Thinkcentre M93P SFF Quadcore i7 dual Raid-ZFS 128GB-SSD 32GB-RAM PCI-Intel i350-t4 NIC, -Intel QAT 8950.
pfSense+ 23.09 VM-Proxmox, Dell Precision Xeon-W2155 Nvme 500GB-ZFS 128GB-RAM PCIe-Intel i350-t4, Intel QAT-8950, P-cloud. -
@cdsJerry said in Can't access 3100 appliance - hacked:
@stephenw10 And these are all fixed IPs and no changes to any of them during this time.
Are you 100% sure, though, that another transient device is not getting connected to the network and then later removed, and this transient device happens to have the same IP address as your pfSense box? The symptoms you describe have the hallmarks of a duplicate IP address on the local network. This transient device could be a wireless device or a wired device (someone's laptop maybe).
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@NollipfSense Thanks for the suggestion. That is a "hot" word. It does appear that someone did get into our network as they connected to the computer used to do our shipping and they shut down several VM machines. It looks like they booted themselves out when they shut down the machine they were using to access our network. The point is.. they got past the firewall somehow and when we went to look at the firewall we found the password appears to have been changed so we think we were indeed "hacked".
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@bmeeks said in Can't access 3100 appliance - hacked:
@cdsJerry said in Can't access 3100 appliance - hacked:
@stephenw10 And these are all fixed IPs and no changes to any of them during this time.
Are you 100% sure, though, that another transient device is not getting connected to the network and then later removed, and this transient device happens to have the same IP address as your pfSense box? The symptoms you describe have the hallmarks of a duplicate IP address on the local network. This transient device could be a wireless device or a wired device (someone's laptop maybe).
There is no wireless access to any fixed IPs or device that has dhcp to any fixed IPs. The only way to access those IPs would be to connect to the managed switch, or the pfSense appliance itself. In our tiny company I'm the only one with access to those pieces of equipment. I didn't make any changes except I swapped out our old pfSense for the appliance while I rebuilt the appliance. The old pfsense and the appliance are not on the same WAN IP so there shouldn't have been a conflict there. And both devices were never both connected at the same time for that matter.
It's still working OK. I've had it open all day today and no glitches in spite of no changes.
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@cdsJerry What you described seems more internal...like a disgruntled employee who knew the network administrator's password and paid back...shame on the network administrator indeed!
