this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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Apparently I installed that thing in 2006 and I last updated it in 2016, then I quit updating it for some reason that I totally forgot. Probably laziness...

It's been running for quite some time and we kind of forgot about it in the closet, until the SSH tunnel we use to get our mail outside our home stopped working because modern openssh clients refuse to use the antiquated key cipher I setup client machines with way back when any longer.

I just generated new keys with a more modern cipher that it understands (ecdsa-sha2-nistp256) and left it running. Because why not πŸ™‚

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (8 children)

It's behind a firewall. The only thing exposed to the outside is port 22 - and only pubkey login too.

And gee dude... It's been running for 18 years without being pwned πŸ™‚

[–] [email protected] 99 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

For that matter, it hasn't been ransomwared. There are so many ways to hide a compromise.

[–] [email protected] 77 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

without being pwned

How do you know?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's a file called /pwnedornot and it contains "no, you're safe bro"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 65 points 2 weeks ago

And it's not like it contains any sensitive information. I'm sure all your emails are just friendly correspondence with your pen pal.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'd still maybe build a modern OpenSSH package.

There's been an awful lot of RCEs in the past two decades and uh, if that's rawdogging the internet, I'm honestly shocked you haven't been hit with any by now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Eh, building anything modern on a system that old would be painful I bet.

Maybe you could use https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable since that’s meant to be portable. I’d certainly would give it a try if I didn’t want to bother trying to upgrade that system. Then again, trying to upgrade it through the releases to a modern Debian might be fun too.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 weeks ago

How do you know? Do you constantly monitor running processes, performance and network connections?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

sorry, but what kind of email server listens only on SSH?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

The most secure ones

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Did you really only use it when you were home? If you used it outside the firewall then port 25 must have been open also.

I used to run my own server and this was in the early 90s. Then one day, perusing the logs I realized I was not smart enough on the security front to even attempt such a thing. It was quickly shut down and the MX record moved to an outsourced mail provider.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

How do you know? OpenSSH is pretty good but it isn't impenetrable. Especially for almost 10 years.