Re:Amazon's customer service backdoor
by andrepd on Sunday January 24, 2016 @11:39PM
(#10965596)
Ssh ports are brute forceable, passwords have a much much larger search space.
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Changed SSH port is not security measure. It's needed to keep your log files clear from random network scanning.
When your SSH port is something like 53148 and you see password brute-force activity in logs it's almost always mean that somebody intentionally scanning your server.
Just a note: if you do change it, keep it below 1024. Otherwise if ssh dies anyone on the server can create a client listening on that port and steal credentials.
That's a somewhat obsolete belief – people have been scanning arbitrary ports for many, many years and SSH daemons helpfully announce themselves to search engines:
https://www.shodan.io/report/uMZDnWfT
This is a long-running problem and one with various popular solutions: restrict the source networks which you accept traffic for, disable password authentication entirely, and add some sort of rate limiting (e.g. 2004's fail2ban) for failures. Trying to reduce log volume by obscurity is futile - you really need to address the root problem and use tools which allow you to filter and aggregate effectively.
At this point, 16 bits of entropy is more than the entropy of a lot of the passwords that I've seen.
Re:Amazon's customer service backdoor
by richardwhiuk on Monday January 25, 2016 @04:28AM
(#10966314)
You have 10 bits of entropy at best, unless you put it above 1024, at which point if it dies, any none privileged user on the box can sniff passwords.
Re:Amazon's customer service backdoor
by Dylan16807 on Monday January 25, 2016 @07:22AM
(#10966761)
Why are you using passwords for SSH?
Do you actually have untrusted users on the box?
Why would you not secure the custom port to root-only?