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.
That makes sense. It feels a bit mad that the difference between getting pwned super easy vs not is something simple like that. But also reassuring to know, cause I was wondering how I heard about so many hobbyist home labs etc getting compromised when it'd be pretty hard to obtain a reasonably secured private key (ie not uploaded onto the cloud or anything, not stored on an unencrypted drive that other people can easily access, etc). But if it's just password logins that makes more sense.