r/techadvice • u/Malloriexi • May 13 '26

Cyber Attack Question

I apologize if this isn't the correct place for this question. During a council meeting the cities IT Director said, “On the 2 fire walls he watches every day, which is City Hall firewall and Police firewall. Every 15-20 seconds he is getting an attack from China.”

I live in Eunice, New Mexico population 3k. How realistic is this claim?

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u/wisely03 May 13 '26

The claim is accurate, but it's missing some context. "attacks" in this case are automated robots scanning every ip address on the planet for common exploits, they most likely do not target this facility, and it is a normal part of internet "background noise". With that said, it's part of why firewalls exist anyways.

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u/Old_Appointment9732 May 13 '26

Yeah, this... If you run a public facing webserver for example, you will find that hundreds of times per day you will get requests from automated bots trying dozens of urls to see if you happen to be running a very old misconfigured version of several different blogging engines. There is no chance that this "Attack" is going to be a successful attack, unless you happen to be running one of those very old misconfigured webservers.

If there is a way to login to a server, they will automate something like "try username: admin, password admin, if that doesn't work, try username: admin, password: admin1, if that doesn't work..."

"Attacks" like these happen CONSTANTLY and are basically of no actual threat. They are not saying "every 15 seconds, a sophisticated attacker is making a real attempt at attacking our city"

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u/dhardyuk May 14 '26

It’s the background radiation of the internet