People Suck (NAS Edition)

People suck.

Last night I had to shut my NAS completely down because some bored stranger on the other side of the planet decided they wanted into it for some reason. They started at 10 in the morning and never gave up. And yes, I understand it wasn't a person sitting there actively trying to get in. But someone deployed whatever automated system spent the entire day flooding my NAS - and by extension my home network - with login requests. Thousands of them, every couple of seconds.

Why?

To look at all of the pictures I take of my dogs that I was using Immich to manage? To steal my Grandma's recipe for Million Dollar Pie that I had saved in Mealie? To see what news sources I was following in FreshRSS? To see all my notes on Buddhism and psychology that I kept stored there?

No, I know what they were after. They wanted something they could steal and exploit in order to ruin my life, either by locking it down and holding it ransom for money or extracting some tidbit that could be used to get into other platforms I use. And why? Just to in some way enrich their own life at the expense of mine.

It really bummed me out. Some loser that doesn't even know I exist ruined something that I really love and enjoy doing, to what... be an asshole to strangers and make an easy buck?

People just suck.

The experience also forced me to realize that I guess I don't know enough about networking and network security to safely run my own NAS and feel confident that the data there is secure. I read the online guides and tutorials. I set up the firewall on my NAS to block traffic from almost everywhere in the world except where I needed it. I set STRICT auto-blocking rules: 2 failed logins in 1 minute would result in an IP ban (I even dropped it to 1 yesterday and it still wasn't enough). I eventually disconnected it from the DDNS service I was using to access my data over the internet and somehow, still, they were able to keep hammering it.

So, back to the drawing board I go, I guess.

I'll eventually do more research and reading and probably end up having to spend more money on things just to make it safe for me to be able to host my own data. It won't be anytime soon, though. It'll be a bit before I'm in the headspace to even look at that stuff again. It makes me mad that we live in a world with so many shitty people in it that get up in the morning just to screw with other people. I wish people could just fuck off and mind their own business.

But I know what they say about wishing into one hand and shitting in the other. So I know that's just how the world is.

People still suck, though.