Re: [Fwd: Re: Re: Automated SSH login attempts?]

[Kenneth Ng <kenneth.d.ng () gmail com>]

I get at least a couple of probes every day.  Almost all are refused
because I have a very restrictive /etc/hosts.allow list.

On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 12:14:30 +0200, Stefan Janecek
<stefan.janecek () jku at> wrote:
> uuups - forgot to cc the list on this one. sorry.
> -----Forwarded Message-----
> From: Stefan Janecek <stefan.janecek () jku at>
> To: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
> Subject: Re: [Full-disclosure] Re: Automated SSH login attempts?
> Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 11:45:51 +0200
> On Thu, 2004-07-29 at 21:35, Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu wrote:
> > 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.....
>
>
> This is exactly what I did. The tool tries to login as users 'test' and
> 'guest'. But I don't think it is about just snarfing passwords, because
> those users did not exist on the compromised machine - yet they got in.
>
> My personal feeling is (given their poor success) that they are using
> some old-fart ssh vulnerability. The compromised machine had an uptime
> of 254 days if I remember correctly, and was hardly used during this
> time, nor has it been updated. Still I would really like to know
> *exactly* what they are doing, just to make sure...
>
>
>
>
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