[TriLUG] Re: Back Oriffice for Linux

[Sinner from the Prairy]

El dia Monday 18 March 2002 07:27 am, no tenies res mes que fer i vas i 
m'envies aquest mail:
> [Andrew Perrin]

> > Er, not to be a stickler, but if someone knows your root password aren't
> > you kind of sunk to begin with? it would be trivial enough, as root,
> > simply to edit Xaccess to give oneself access.

> Arguably, they should be able to know your root password but still
> not be able to do anything from a remote location over the network.
> ssh's PermitRootLogin=no
>
> Calling this a "remote root exploit" would be a misnomer given the
> password requirement, but it's still seemingly a tool that could
> be a (admittedly slow) running crack on your machine :)


Let me answer to both of you at the same time:

This "Exploits" relies in the bad password picking policy that many 
(some/most/a few) Linux users follow. Yes, having as a password your 
middlename followed by a one-digit number makes very easy to be identified by 
those bad guys / black hackers / script kiddies.

And many users do not change their root password often enough (or never). 

And, of course, noone wants some unknown guy in North Korea to "remotely 
administer" our box and set up open relay on sendmail. Am I right?



Salut,
Sinner
-- 
"I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father 
smelt of elderberries!"
RedHat QA Test Engineer  --  Running RedHat 7.2 on i386smp
http://www.ibiblio.org/sinner/