I was cleaning up some stuff on an old but still pretty important prod server and not paying enough attention on that day. Turns out in retrospect that accidentally deleting ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the main user account was not a good idea.

As the panic was starting to sink in, I managed to find out that an unprivileged user account was still available for SSH login. Once I got a hold of it, I then tried my hand at running several privilege escalation exploits... until one of them worked (what a relief) and I could finally restore proper SSH access on the main user account.

It was both a proud and a pretty embarrassing moment.