this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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    Background: 15 years of experience in software and apparently spoiled because it was already set up correctly.

    Been practicing doing my own servers, published a test site and 24 hours later, root was compromised.

    Rolled back to the backup before I made it public and now I have a security checklist.

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    [–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    Interesting. Do you know how it got compromised?

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

    I published it to the internet and the next day, I couldn't ssh into the server anymore with my user account and something was off.

    Tried root + password, also failed.

    Immediately facepalmed because the password was the generic 8 characters and there was no fail2ban to stop guessing.

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    wow crazy that this was the default setup. It should really force you to either disable root or set a proper password (or warn you)

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    Most distributions disable root by default

    [–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Which ones? I'm asking because that isn't true for cent, rocky, arch.

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    Mostly Ubuntu. And... I think it's just Ubuntu.

    [–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago

    Ah fair enough, I know that's the basis of a ton of distros. I lean towards RHEL so I'm not super fluent there.

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

    we're probably talking about different things. virtually no distribution comes with root access with a password. you have to explicitly give the root user a password. without a password no amount of brute force sshing root will work. I'm not saying the root user is entirely disabled. so either the service OP is building on is basically a goldmine for compromised machines or OP literally shot themselves in the root by giving root a password manually. something you should never do.

    [–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    Yeah I was confused about the comment chain. I was thinking terminal login vs ssh. You're right in my experience...root ssh requires user intervention for RHEL and friends and arch and debian.

    Side note: did you mean to say "shot themselves in the root"? I love it either way.

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    Don't use passwords for ssh. Use keys and disable password authentication.

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

    More importantly, don't open up SSH to public access. Use a VPN connection to the server. This is really easy to do with Netbird, Tailscale, etc. You should only ever be able to connect to SSH privately, never over the public net.

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    It's perfectly safe to run SSH on port 22 towards the open Internet with public key authentication only.

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2024-6409 RCE as root without authentication via Open SSH. If they've got a connection, that's more than nothing and sometimes it's enough.

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    That attack vector is exactly the same towards a VPN.

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    A VPN like Wireguard can run over UDP on a random port which is nearly impossible to discover for an attacker. Unlike sshd, it won't even show up in a portscan.

    This was a specific design goal of Wireguard by the way (see "5.1 Silence is a virtue" here https://www.wireguard.com/papers/wireguard.pdf)

    It also acts as a catch-all for all your services, so instead of worrying about the security of all the different sshds or other services you may have exposed, you just have to keep your vpn up to date.

    [–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago

    Yeah I don't do security via obscurity :D I agree you need to keep your Internet facing services up to date.

    (No need to educate me on Wireguard, I use it. My day job is slightly relevant to the discussion)