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I didn't know you were supposed to disable root user... (linux.community)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 29 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I'm confused. I never disable root user and never got hacked.

Is the issue that the app is coded in a shitty way maybe ?

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    You can't really disable the root user. You can make it so they can't login remotely, which is highly suggested.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child) 
    sudo passwd -l root

    This disables the root user

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    There's no real advantage to disable the root user, and I really don't recommend it. You can disable SSH root login, and as long as you ensure root has a secure password that's different than your own account your system is just as safe with the added advantage of having the root account incase something happens.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    That wouldn't be defense in depth. You want to limit anything that's not necessary as it can become a source of attack. There is no reason root should be enabled.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    I don't understand. You will still need to do administrative tasks once in a while so it isn't really unnecessary, and if root can't be logged in, that will mean you will have to use sudo instead, which could be an attack vector just as su.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Why do like, houses have doors man. You gotta eliminate all points of egress for security, maaaan. /s

    There's no particular reason to disable root, and with a hardened system, it's not even a problem you need to worry about...

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Another thing you can do under certain circumstances which I'm sure someone on here will point out is depreciated is use TCP Wrappers. If you are only connecting to ssh from known IP addresses or IP address ranges then you can effectively block the rest of the world from accessing you. I used a combination of ipset list, fail2ban and tcp wrappers along with my firewall which like is also something old called iptables-persistent. I've also moved my ssh port up high and created several other fake ports that keep anyone port scanning my IP guessing.

    These days I have all ports closed except for my wireguard port and access all of my hosted services through it.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    You can't really disable it anyway.

    Hardening is mostly prevent root login from outside in case every other layer of authentication and access control broke, do not allow regular user to su/sudo into it for free, and have a tight grip on anything that's executable and have a setuid bit set. I did not install a system from scratch in a long time but I believe this would be the default on most things that are not geared toward end-user devices, too.

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