break-in attempt in my machine

[Joel Rees]

On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 2:36 AM, Volker Wysk <post at volker-wysk.de> wrote:
> Am Samstag, 3. September 2016, 09:51:30 CEST schrieb Joel Rees:
>> [...]
>> > I've implemented no 2, 3, 5 and 10 now... I won't disable root logins,
>> > because I want root sftp access.

Go ahead and get the rest of his suggestions implemented while you
figure out the principles that underly them.

Then go back and do them right, according to what right will be for
your environment.

You don't have to do everything perfectly all at once in emergency
mode. Just don't ever think the job is done and you can now forget it.

>> Why?
>>
>> Are you allergic to sudo or even su?
>
> As I've written: I want SFTP access. You can't do a "sudo" command in sftp.
>

Is that because you don't want to be able to sudo random commands from
your non-root admin account, or because you haven't heard of scp?

I do believe there are gui interfaces to scp. I just use the man
command when I forget the syntax. Different strokes, as they say.

> I think now, I'll make a more random password...

Once you understand how the currently available attacks work, it's a
bit easier to craft something arbitrary that will appear essentially
random to the random attacker.

:)

If you are subject to targeted attacks, you may want to resort to
imitating password generating programs (because it becomes a game of
trying to guess what the attacker will not guess you would guess the
attacker would not guess or something like that).

And truly random passwords are also not hard to memorize if you use
them often enough. I've had something like ten really hard passwords
in use at one time, but that's also where I start depending on
publickey to remember the ones I don't use that often, so to speak.

-- 
Joel Rees

I'm imagining I'm a novelist:
http://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2016/04/economics-101-novel-rough-draft-index.html