DevOps Articles

Server under attack!

This is an account of my first glimpse of the dangers in the cyberworld in March 2017, or more precisely the SSH brute-force attack. There is probably nothing new here to a cloud veteran, however it might be of value to DevOps novices, personal website maintainers, hobbyists, or students.

I turned it back on, and — This time I learned the lesson to leave one SSH connection open, and attempted to login in a new terminal.

That was no surprise, considering that the firewall had been blocking the new SSH port entirely until I shut it down in the morning, and my security rule was blocking the old SSH port.

There was a short time window of vulnerability in the morning after I temporarily shutdown the firewall and before I disabled password login, and it was lucky that no one caught that.