Ssh break in attempt

[mailinglistmatt at gmail.com (Matt Erasmus)]

I wouldn't worry too much about SSH brute force attempts. There are
many many of these attacks happening daily and unless you have some
stupid user account like "bob" with "bob123" as your password, you
should be alright.

If you really want to be a little more proactive, take a look at
Denyhosts [1] which will help stem the tide. There are also iptables
rules which you can use to throttle back the attacks. I'll see if I
can dig these up for you.

As for logged in users, check your last log or even
auth.log/secure.log depending on distro. You could probably script
something to alert you should there be a login from elsewhere. But
honestly, once that happens it's game over. The time frame from
successful login to complete rooting of the server is very very low.

For Apache, you should be checking your access/error logs. I haven't
had a chance to really look into this though...

While I'm thinking about it, check out OSSEC [2]. Very very cool HIDS
which runs on Linux/Windows. It'll help a lot with most of your
issues.

</0.02c>

[1] http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.ossec.net

On 11 March 2010 01:49, Brett <cgkades at gmail.com> wrote:
> I realized I haven't checked my logs on my new server ( bad me ). But
> I figured I wouldn't find anything, it's only my personal server. I
> checked the logs today to find thousands of login attempts. Most tried
> to brute my root password, though I don't have a root user. There were
> a bunch of user name attempts for what looked like a name dictionary
> attack. Some were from busness static ip's and there were even some
> from perdu.edu
>
> Now for my questions. What should I look for to find out if they
> actually got in? Parse the auth log for those ip's for a successfull
> login? I also run a web server on that machine, is there something I
> can look for to see If they got into that? Also is there any recourse
> I have? Or should I just let it go and harden my server even more?



-- 
Matt
@z0nbi