Re: Darn skiddies (ssh login attempts)

[Chris Adams <cadams@salk.edu>]

On Mar 31, 2005, at 11:40 PM, Robert Lemmen wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 10:44:53PM -0600, Brad Sims wrote:
> > `less /var/log/auth.log|grep Failed|wc -l` shows 185 attempts to 
> > compromise
> > my machine since March 27th...
>
> of course the only thing that really helps is good passwords,

Or no passwords - if requiring public key authentication is feasible 
for a system you can disable password authentication entirely:

PubkeyAuthentication yes
PasswordAuthentication no
ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
PAMAuthenticationViaKbdInt no

If you have systems which for various reasons need to be accessible 
from many locations this is an excellent way to sleep a little easier. 
Given that many utilities exist to simplify ssh-agent use it's starting 
to be feasible to switch user-visible machines over to this 
configuration in many environments - ease of use is a big carrot.

Chris

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