Re: Re: Automated SSH login attempts?

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 18:38:15 +0200, Stefan Janecek <stefan.janecek () jku at>  said:
> This does not seem to be a stupid brute force attack, as there is only
> one login attempt per user. Could it be that the tool tries to exploit
> some vulnerability in the sshd, and just tries to look harmless by using
> 'test' and 'guest' as usernames?

Highly doubtful.  It's easy enough to test though - just use the tool
to poke another machine under your control, and use tcpdump or ethereal
to capture all the traffic (don't forget '-s 1500' or similar for tcpdump
to get the *whole* packet).  Then somebody familiar with the SSH
protocol can go through it byte by byte and look for anything odd.

I don't expect we'll find anything, unless it's some very hard to trigger hole
on some odd architecture. Remember - with all of these probes, we're only
seeing a very few boxes actually get 0wned. More likely, script kiddies have
re-discovered the concept that if there's 500 million boxes online, enough of
them are administered by clueless people that they can snarf shells using a
default userid/password pair.....

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