Direct Server Access

What can be done with physical access to a server? Could I somehow load an XMR miner onto this thing? Can I spy on web traffic? What are some possibilities and the likelihood of being able to just plug in a laptop and having access? ITT: Physical Server Security

Don't allow outsiders to access servers, the game is lost.

Btw. Bad photo, I don't see any servers there.

>>19560 Any amount of physical access to servers is just generally bad. >Could I somehow load an XMR miner onto this thing? Without disk encryption or a bios password, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted by booting it to a liveusb. >Can I spy on web traffic? Obviously you could install some monitoring software or just really any malware if you can boot to a liveusb, but if that didn't work you could spy on unencrypted traffic using a lan tap. >What [is] ... the likelihood of being able to just plug in a laptop and having access? It depends on whoever set up and maintained the hardware. If it's a school or some small company, then it's not unreasonable. If it's google or amazon, ignoring how you got to their servers, not a chance. It's really hard to account for ALL potential attacks, and even if you did secure the software side of things perfectly they could potentially still mess with the hardware e.g. removing all power and the cmos battery to reset the bios, or just stealing or destroying physical equipment.

>>19560 thats a switch, you are unlikely to be able to get an xmr miner running on it unless you develop one custom made. the most amount of fun you could have here is by installing a passive fiber tap on the orange fiber jumper and duplicating traffic into a box you'd leave in the rack that you can remote back into. likely wouldnt be able to get much, most traffic would be encrypted.

>>19720 You may not be able to get to much in the way of data, but the metadata can be helpful for recon. It can help you understand what outbound connections a machine is making, which implies what kind of programs it is executing, thus piercing through the veil of obscurity letting you learn about some of the attack surface you'd need to research in order to crack a machine in some way.