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Is Your Office Haunted?
WormholeFiend writes "You know Halloween is around the corner when websites like Forbes.com releases a story wondering about the supernatural. From the article: 'Maybe the spirits have decided that spooky mansions and creepy battlefields are passé. Maybe they want to cash in on the glamour of corporate life. Maybe they just wanted the sushi.'" Anyone out there have any encounters with a spiritual Milton?
You wouldn't do it right? Because you know you'd be out $1000.
No, I wouldn't do it because I'd have a bunch of pseudo-scientists clambering over me for my delicious bounty.
It's already been done. So if you are the "brilliant scientist" with evidence, just give the the amazing randi" a call and you can be a "brilliant scientist" with a million dollars.
Wanted: Clever sig, top $ paid, all offers considered.
At my office, some mysterious creature keeps "watering" the floor of the men's restroom. Does that count?
Here at MIT, we regularly see ghostly figures walking around in distress at 4 in the morning. We call them grad students.
(Bob is a analyst at a security operations center for an ISP. He sent me this email and I decided I'd pass it on to you guys for review. Is this even possible? I'm not sure, but it sure did freak Bob out. He can't bring himself to go back to the SOC anymore, and he's looking for telecommuting jobs on Monster. --Alice)
Alice,
I know you're gonna think I'm crazy but you're the only one I can think who would possibly listen to what I'm about to say without immediately dismissing it. Please, read my whole account of what happened to me tonight before writing me off.
I went into work last night for the graveyard shift. Yeah, graveyard shift on Halloween, haha. We'd just ramped up to 24/7 ops the previous week so this was going to be my first night alone in the SOC. I was pretty excited at first, since I wouldn't have any of these other knuckleheads in my hair while I was doing some hard core analysis, you know? I logged into my station, started some queries for deltas in the previous 24, and went to get some coffee, since it was going to be a long night.
Little did I know...
After returning to the SOC with my joe, Carol gave me the briefing on the days events (in a nutshell, nothing - apparently all the s'kiddies were gearing up for Trick or Treating and not harassing us). She did mention something that didn't show up in any of the reports though - a general "weirdness" to the traffic in the DMZ. She couldn't really qualify it, but she said she though something kind of odd was going on. Okay Carol, I'll keep my eyes open (as I roll them back into my head). She punched out and I was all alone.
Or was I?
I threw some tunes on WinAmp and started to rock out while pouring over the output of my earlier queries. My attempts at scripting up some rudimentary anomaly detection in our aggregation console appeared to be woefully inadequate or simply functioning properly with a dearth of anomalies when I saw it.
A new host in the DMZ.
A host which had apparently come up at midnight local, October 31st. Who the hell stands up a box in the DMZ at *midnight* on a Saturday night? It had to be the mouth-breathers in development relying on the assumption that no one would be monitoring the network over the weekend. Heh, nice try chumps, but you've just tweaked the wrong BOFH. To cover my bases, I looked up the latest network diagrams for the DMZ. Just as I thought, nothing authorized or even submitted regarding a new box in the DMZ. Finally, after months of slaving away over reports I was going to get to demand someone take a box down. I could feel the power coursing through my fingertips as I began to compose the flame to end all flames.
"Dear clownboats,"
I hesitated. What would they come back with? I needed more ammunition to stave off a possible counteroffensive. I decide to scan the box, to see how much risk these "developers" were actually exposing my DMZ to. A quick nmap returned results the likes of which I had not seen since my days at that dot bomb in Sunnyvale.
"Remote operating system guess: Linux 2.0.35-37"
W
T
F
Two-oh? Was this some sort of prank? These guys are dullards to be sure, but no one is this stupid. It's gotta be some sort of security through ob-fu or something. I had to know. Telnetting quickly confirmed my worst fears.
Trying 10.31.10.31...
Connected to 10.31.10.31.
Escape character is '^]'.
Red Hat Linux release 5.2 (Apollo)
Kernel 2.0.36 on an i486
login:
I stared, dumfounded, at the prompt's ever-blinking cursor. I tried to wrap my head around what I was seeing. Red Hat FIVE DOT FSKING TWO? Even if this was a honeypot, this was ridiculous. What were they trying to do, find out which kiddie has the oldest sploits?
I did what any sane security professional would do in my situation.
I typed "root".
The box retorted with "Password:"
I reiterated, "root".
[root@zion root]#
A chill crept out of my keyboard and up my spine as I realized that
I've had a couple of 'spooky' occurances at my previous job. I was often the last one to leave, so it was up to me to turn out all the lights and lock up. There was a spot in the hallway where if I came around the corner at the right speed, I'd see the outline of a human figure for a brief moment. The weird thing was, I could almost recognize the form. Somehow I recognized it as a coworker that had left the company long before that! I hadn't been in touch with him for over a year. Was he coming back to tell me something? Well, at least he was smiling, just as I always remembered him.
... same thing, doing my rounds, turning out the lights. Then I noticed the building across the street. There was a figure in the window that was standing perfectly still. I could barely see it, but I could definitely see its eyes. It freaked me out. This was in downtown Portland. This is an area of town full of 'historic' buildings, including the one I was working in. Was some spectre looming around? Well, it was easy to believe that considering it was night time and nobody else was about. Very creepy.
Another night
Welp, now for the anti-climactic bit. Niether were ghosts. The outline of a figure I saw? Trick of the eye. That corner had some boxes and loose stuff piled up. Looking straight on at the pile, it didn't look anything remotely like my coworker. I think what happened was a trick of my peripheral vision. As most of you know, the outer areas of human eyes are keen on detecting motion more than they are with recognizing images. Can't claim to be an expert on the topic, but I think the human brain is constantly looking to recongize patterns, and when it finds one that seems to be relevent, it fills in the blanks. Hence, I saw my coworker. If anybody's curious, he's alive and well.
I suppose I could go into a little more detail about my theory here. There's a technique called 'EVP'. It's used to record the voices of ghosts. If you ever get bored one night, do a search for EVP and find some samples. It isn't definitive proof of the existance of ghosts, but at the very least it's a fun way to kill an evening. (usually there are stories attached to these sounds...) I visited a site once that had a number of EVP samples. Unfortunately, ghost speech isn't terribly easy to make out. Though it does sound human, it's barely more than garbled garbage. What they did was they presented a sound and said "first you listen to it and then try to work out what it's saying, then click on this link to see suggestions of what people think they've heard." The reason they do this is to prevent you from being 'suggested' into believing what you're hearing. After listening to a bit, I worked out why. The sound file downloaded and looped over and over again. I couldn't make it out. Then I read the first suggestion. Suddenly, I was hearing it! Neat! Then I read the second suggestion. And.. wait.. now I'm hearing that one. They were two very different sentences. As a matter of fact, I thought I could hear a different inflection in the words used by the 'ghost' that time around! It was the same sound looping over and over again, but now it was sounding different. Okay, I took the scenic route to this point, but I think what I was hearing was not the sound directly, but my perception of the sound. My brain thought it heard a particular sentence, so that's exactly what made it into my conscience mind. I think the sight of my coworker was a similar phenomenon.
And the figure across the street? Somebody with an odd sense of humor. It's a cardboard cutout. For whatever reason, they put it up against the window on the 3rd story of the building. The light was dim enough that it was very tough to make out, but the next day I was able to see it quite clearly. I mentioned seeing his eyes. It felt like they were following me almost. Again, trick of the eye.
I don't know what I think about ghosts. I can't say I firmly believe they exist, I can't say they don'
"Derp de derp."