If you really had password logins turned off, you need to identify and isolate how they gained access before you put that box online again. Never "hope" or "cross fingers" that it doesn't happen again. Unless you are an interesting target for some reason, chances are that these attacks are automated and you are running some insecure software somewhere.

Start by taking a snapshot of the machine before you do anything else. Go through the logs. Are there any unwanted processes? How were they started? Are there any unwanted binaries in the filesystem? How were they uploaded? Try to find IP addresses that that be tied to any unwanted login, and see search your logs for any previous occurrences.

Pay special attention to any web-reachable software you have installed.

Do you have a handy link for more info about that?

`rp_filter`? https://www.slashroot.in/linux-kernel-rpfilter-settings-reve...

Is there any way to configure SSH to use a custom high-entry password that's different from the user's local password? My local password is something reasonable for me to type regularly (e.g. for sudo prompts), but I'd love to have a super long password just for SSH that I have to copy from my password manager each time.

I mean either you sftp to a shared folder that can be accessed from your regular user as well or you use a staging area with a cron job (or you load/unload the staging area manually.)

I'm not deploying a website so a staging area isn't applicable. This is just a VPS that I use for various purposes.

Set a long password for the user you log in as (correct horse battery staple-style passwords are perfect for such things), and make sure to put SSH on an alternate port to keep the more basic bots away and thereby reduce the noise.

Having to type a long password for sudo promts is a bit of a pain, but that trade-off is worth it from a security perspective.

You mean an RSA private key? (no really, that's exactly what it is... you can put your private key in your password manager and copy it to your computer)

But it's probably just a coincidence.

Separately, this is a huge blow for Instagram/Facebook since this is one of the busiest social media sharing weeks in the US. I bet a lot of their engineers are answering pagers on vacation.

I had not connected Huawei to my conspiracy theory yet, but just did.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG1215.html

(Yes I realize WhatsApp is a different segment, an important way people communicate.)

So I'm actually genuinely curious what YC/HN's official position on this is. Asking broadly.

It was a link to a RAND report warning the US Military of cyber-attacks in the US, the report starting off as: "The chances are growing that the United States will find itself in a crisis in cyberspace, with the escalation of tensions associated with a major cyberattack, suspicions that one has taken place, or fears that it might do so soon."

"The chances are growing that the United States will find itself in a crisis in cyberspace, with the escalation of tensions associated with a major cyberattack, suspicions that one has taken place, or fears that it might do so soon."

It's not quite about a world war on the Internet, but it is about what could happen if the Internet suddenly stops working somewhere.

Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

It could also be just a really strange coincidence.

1) a secret cyber-war is going on...

2) Some entity is installing new spying slurps

3) An (critical) IX that we werent aware of is having major issues... and we dont know who to blame on that one...

AFAF

"Impossible" means "impossible", not "unbelievably improbable".

That's even more true when you ask about "mathematically impossible", as it reinforces the idea of formal logic being the relevant domain, where precise meaning of words is fundamental.

If you adjust your question to be "at what probability is it unreasonable to claim these problems are unrelated?", then the answer is subjective - different people have different standards for reasonability.

I think we'd need mountains more data than we have about the incidents to compute a meaningful probability, anyway.

(Your HN account is 4 months old. Mine is ten years old)

I like this theory...

Its innocent but id like to see data behind it.

https://www.empireblue.com/

In my experience this is so true! The opposite applies as well,for some reason everything behaves quietly all at once and I turn up every leav and look under every carpet for a "problem" with the monitoring or something worse.

Probability is funny, for example I don't think anyone has explained exactly why numbers that start with '1' are so common. I think it's just geometric symmetry if complex event chains.

People naturally find coincidences curious. It's how we find causality.