I didn’t lose my first server to a sophisticated hacker; I lost it to a stranger with a sense of humor and to my own procrastination.

Around the turn of the millennium, I was a student running a small home server. It housed my music collection, hundreds of tracks painstakingly ripped from CDs and encoded by hand. In an era of dial-up and slow processors, that collection represented days of real, manual effort.

To make the music available across my devices, I set up an NFS share on a Linux machine, which also doubled as my firewall and router. In my haste, I bound the share to the machine’s public IP.

I moved all my music there. It was meant to be temporary.

I planned it as a quick solution I would replace with a clean, secure setup the next day.

The Temporary Setup

The NFS share was thrown together late one evening. Something I could write my collection to. There were no permission restrictions and no firewall rules to block access from the Internet.

I knew this was insecure and risky. But nothing would happen overnight, right?

I told myself I would fix read/write permissions and Internet access the next day.

But as often happens, tomorrow became next week. Next week became later. And later became forgotten.

The setup worked for the moment, and I moved everything I had onto that share. Then I stopped thinking about it.

From my perspective, the system was “done enough for now.” I had more important things to do than hardening a temporary file server, and over time I simply forgot about it.

The Wake-Up Call

A couple of weeks later, I tried to access my collection from my laptop.

Instead of thousands of files, there was only a single file left.

Its name was:

your_music_sucked_so_i_deleted_it

That was it. The entire collection was gone.

Someone had found the share. Permissions were wrong, the NFS service was reachable from the Internet, there were no firewall rules, and no credentials were required. I knew this was bound to happen someday, but I stopped caring after a while.

What I Learned

Looking back, this was not an advanced attack. Someone port-scanned my IP, found the open NFS service, and mounted it to delete the files. It wasn’t hard, and it wasn’t even targeted.

The incident was caused by an exposed service, weak assumptions, and a temporary solution that quietly became permanent.

The lessons have stuck with me:

  • There are no temporary solutions. Nothing lasts longer than a quick fix.
  • Just because it works doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. You can put together a quick and dirty solution, but should you? This question still comes up often in my career and is frustratingly often answered wrong.
  • Chickens come home to roost. Every shortcut, quick hack, or dirty solution will eventually come back to haunt you.

Twenty-Five Years Later

This experience shaped how I think about cybersecurity to this day.

Most failures don’t stem from a lack of complex cryptography or an inability to stop a ‘mastermind’ hacker. They arise from the small decisions we make when we’re tired, rushed, or both - the shortcuts taken “just for now” that, if we’re honest, everyone knows will never be revisited.

They’re made simply to get the task done in time.

Security isn’t a task you finish; it’s a discipline you maintain.

Today, I still see exactly the same pattern. Only now it happens with missing input validation, hard-coded credentials in production code, private keys in Git repositories, or “temporary” log outputs that contain sensitive data.

These days I push hard for “temporary” things to carry an explicit expiration date, whether that’s a story for the next sprint or a function that will intentionally no longer work with the next version.

Sometimes, this works.

I still listen to the same music collection today; it just took a while to rebuild it.

And no, it doesn’t suck.