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from the cat-and-mouse-and-dogged-determination dept.
A couple years ago I set up a simple brochure-ware site for the School Board in the district here in Brooklyn, hosted on a VPS instance on Linode, to publicize the dates of public meetings, meeting minutes, etc. The VPS doesn't contain any sensitive information so I locked down the ports to 80, 443, and 22, hardened the SSH with measures like fail2ban, kept the system updated every week or so, and called it a day.
Last week, though, the site was compromised. Blowing the instance away and re-creating it from physical backups is not a problem, but in poring through the system to figure out how it was breached I realized both that my own security chops aren't deep enough and that standard best security practices might not be good enough anymore, anyway, given the many vulnerabilities exposed in the last year and realities like the NSA trove that Shadow Brokers leaked.
So the question for the more experienced security professionals in the Soylent community is, can they recommend a good guide and/or site to hone linux security chops and forensic skills that's current?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @06:15AM
a. Your hosting provider may have been compromised. Your site was attacked via a hole in Xen, VMWare, or Linux containers.
b. Your client, used for ssh, was compromised.
c. Intel's management firmware bug got you. That chip on the motherboard either attacked your kernel or it is itself doing the outbound ssh.
d. The outbound ssh is running in SMM (system management mode) and was possibly installed by the PC vendor. It could be even, or just crummy anti-theft stuff calling home.
e. Debian is compromised. They may have a bad developer or ftp maintainer.
f. Maybe you got a bad install disk, and thus you aren't actually using Debian. It looks like Debian, being based off of Debian, but it has different package sources.