I am not blaming this on SSH (also, no longer in that org for many years).

I am just pointing out (also in few other, off-site discussions), that one should not even think of exposing a port before finishing locking it down.

Because sometimes people forget, even experienced people (including myself), and sometimes that's enough (I think someone few weeks ago submitted a story which involved getting pwned through accidentally exposed postgres?).

And there's enough people who get it wrong for various reasons that lowest of low script kiddies can profit buying ready-made extortion kits on chinese forums, getting a single VM with windows to run them, and extort money from gambling/gameserver sites. Not to mention all the fun stuff if you search for open VNC/RDP.

Your security is only as good as the people running your system. Unfortunately not everyone has teams of the best of the best. Sometimes you get a the jr dev guy assigned to things. They do not know any better and just do as they are told. It is the deputized sheriff problem.

In that case it wasn't even the junior's fault - they were following experts from Juniper who were supposed to be past-masters on installing that specific piece of crap (as someone who later accidentally became developer of that piece of crap for a time, I feel I have the basis for the claim).

And those people told him the install system didn't support SSH keys (hindsight: they did) and got him to make the root logins possible with passwords. Passwords that weren't particularly hard to guess because their only expected and planned use was for the other team to login for the first time and set their own, before the machines were to be exposed to internet, using BMC.