‘Twas the Night Before Breachmas
What happens the night before Breachmas? Here's a fun song with lyrics telling the story. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a secure night!
‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the net,
Not a hacker was stirring, no breaches were set.
The firewalls were patched with meticulous care,
In hopes that no threat actors soon would be there.
The admins were nestled all snug in their chairs,
With visions of downtime (a dream, oh so rare).
And I at my console, my coffee in hand,
Had just settled in for a last-minute scan.
When out on the server there arose such a clatter,
I sprang to my keyboard to see what was the matter.
Away to the logs I flew like a flash,
Pulled up the reports and searched through the cache.
The glow of the monitor on my tired eyes,
Gave the lustre of exploits hidden in disguise.
When what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a botnet attempting to brute-force us here.
With a little old hacker, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment this wasn’t Saint Nick.
More rapid than updates, his packets they came,
And he spoofed, and he phished, and he called them by name:
“Now Rootkit! Now Ransomware! Malware and Phishing!
On DDoS! On Spyware! Let's get this system glitching!
To the edge of the cloud! To the deep dark web crawl!
Now exfiltrate! Exfiltrate! Exfiltrate all!”
But I, in my hoodie, so calm and composed,
Had MFA ready and threats soon deposed.
Backups were mounted and logs checked with care,
This hacker would find no vulnerabilities there.
As packets slowed down and the alerts all did fade,
I sighed with relief at the defenses I’d laid.
The SIEM it had hummed with a low, steady glow,
Reporting no breaches from this attempted show.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the call,
The voices of teammates, “Great work from us all!”
They logged into Zoom, their screens aglow,
And together we toasted to the year’s final show.
The hacker, defeated, withdrew from his schemes,
And we laughed as we logged off, to cybersecurity dreams.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he logged out of sight,
“Merry Christmas to all, and to all a secure night!”