[SLL] sharing superuser account is always bad policy, right?

[Derek Simkowiak]

    Phil,
    Their mea culpa notwithstanding, they still store customer passwords 
in plaintext, which is (in my opinion) enough reason to drop them.  They 
should store an MD5 or SHA hash, and that's it.

    If somebody cracks their ultra-secure Microsoft SQL Server database 
that holds all their customer passwords, your root password will be 
compromised (along with everyone else's).

    The fact that they use passwords to do root maintenance -- instead 
of SSH keys -- is a major red flag.  What if their employee Joe The 
Administrator gets fired?  Will he take retribution on your server 
(since he happened to know your root password from working on it 
before)?  Will they ask you to reset your root password anytime an 
employee gets fired?  If they were using SSH keys, they could just 
delete Joe's public key from /root/.ssh/authorized_keys and not have to 
worry about it.

     Here's a little experiment: set up a box with SSH listening on port 
22, and make it accessible from the Internet.  Within a few hours 
(usually a few minutes) you'll start seeing dictionary password attacks 
in your log file.  Those dictionary attacks will trickle in ad 
infinitum.  (A group of developers in Germany told me they see the same 
thing over there, too.)


--Derek

On 02/06/2009 10:22 AM, Phil Mocek wrote:
> [...snip...]
> Someone from their tech support department followed up with an
> apology for their request to have me send the root password via
> e-mail and wrote:
>   
> [...snip...]