Background: 15 years of experience in software and apparently spoiled because it was already set up correctly.
Been practicing doing my own servers, published a test site and 24 hours later, root was compromised.
Rolled back to the backup before I made it public and now I have a security checklist.
we’re probably talking about different things. virtually no distribution comes with root access with a password. you have to explicitly give the root user a password. without a password no amount of brute force sshing root will work. I’m not saying the root user is entirely disabled. so either the service OP is building on is basically a goldmine for compromised machines or OP literally shot themselves in the root by giving root a password manually. something you should never do.
Yeah I was confused about the comment chain. I was thinking terminal login vs ssh. You’re right in my experience…root ssh requires user intervention for RHEL and friends and arch and debian.
Many cloud providers (the cheap ones in particular) will put patches on top of the base distro, so sometimes root always gets a password. Even for Ubuntu.
There are ways around this, like proper cloud-init support, but not exactly beginner friendly.
#no thank you lol