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.

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[–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

Although disabling the root user is a good part of security, leaving it enabled should not alone cause you to get compromised. If it did, you were either running a very old version of OpenSSH with a known flaw, or, your chosen root password was very simple.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    The latter. It was autogenerated by the VPS hosting service and I didn't think about it.

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