Patch to Log SSH Passwords – One Year Results

http://w8rbt.org/patches/

by w8rbt • 12 years ago

81 59 12 years ago

w8rbt.org

ryan-c4• 12 years ago

I wonder what's up with all the super long entries in there. Bugs in the bots?

pdoconnell• 12 years ago

I'd guess that they're unique passwords taken from plain text password dumps that ended up in dictionaries.

korzun• 12 years ago

It looks like ever wrote the scanner (that hit this honeypot) thought it would be a great idea to count on instances where terminal becomes laggy/crashes during a password change.

Adminstrator would then set a new password by an accident.

My theory anyways.

tedunangst• 12 years ago

Damn! I was certain nobody would guess my password of eight commas.

byuu2• 12 years ago

Shit!! Someone guessed my password as well, on line 1120!

    000000.000000000**0000000000000000000ooooo000111222333000OOO00OO0O0O0011447700384zxh.007Martin00idc805188..e0102030114110123.01234.01234.*012345601234567.*0123456789!@0123lhb0123014785236901601hr0205\\023022-58810235025516700270301fjfzw1=-03110368350037804047

I thought for sure a 260-character password with 1,560 bits of entropy would be sufficient. I better go change it right away :O

jamiesonbecker• 12 years ago

I just don't know why people still use passwords with SSH anyway! (ie userify and stuff)

imron• 12 years ago

Not sure why you're getting downvotes. I use key authentication for all my SSH needs.

If it's important enough to still need a password on top of that, the password can go on the key.

e12e• 12 years ago

Huh? Always encrypt the ssh-key, and use ssh-agent for convenience. That said it is now quite easy to set up proper two-factor authentication: eg key and otp.

sebastianavina• 12 years ago

well, for generating/uploading your key, you need a password.

jdpage• 12 years ago

When I was first introduced to SSH, the administrator had me transmit my public key to them and they added it to my account themselves, and that's how I've done it on all the servers I administrate since. This way, you can disable password authentication entirely.

dmix• 12 years ago

Who is proposing using passwords for SSH is a good idea? This is a honeypot.

ytch• 12 years ago

It's just a honeypot, not a real server with password-based auth.

lucaspiller• 12 years ago

At work we have to send data to a few third parties, it's pretty much up to them how they set up their end. I think everything is using SFTP at least, but a few still have passwords rather than keys. The accounts are restricted so you can't get a full shell though. My guess is these systems are designed by non-technical people who don't really understand the issues.

jijji• 12 years ago

use ssh keys or use iptables whitelisting on all your boxes

byuu2• 12 years ago

Alternatively or in addition, add a firewall rule to permanently ban any IPs after too many failed attempts or simultaneous connections, make sure root login is disabled, and/or put sshd on a non-standard port (I find the last one a bit of security theater, but it will reduce some wasted traffic if nothing else.) Here's my pf rule for ssh (brute force filter):

    table <sshbans> persist
    block quick from <sshbans>
    pass quick proto tcp from any to any port ssh \
      flags S/SA keep state \
      (max-src-conn 15, max-src-conn-rate 5/3, \
      overload <sshbans> flush global)

Raise the values a bit if you have other SSH users on your box.

I get about 50 new bans a day. It's pretty much guaranteed if you have a server on the web with port 22 open, that bots will be attempting to brute-force it.

dsl• 12 years ago

I'll save you the time of downloading the full results.

'hunter2' is in the list.

VonGuard• 12 years ago

How come when I type "hunter2" it comes up "*"?

gburt• 12 years ago

Wait, who is logging SSH passwords? Is this an intentional attack on OpenSSH Portable or is it a honeypot?

w8rbt2• 12 years ago

Sheep dogs and wolves. The sheep have no idea. If you are asking the question, take a deep breath and say, "bah".

Thimothy• 12 years ago

Yeah. Bah at you all day long.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-07-27/

wglb2• 12 years ago

Hang any SSHD on the internet, and within minutes you get these attempts. You can choose to log the passwords if you like and this is what you would see.

xtrumanx• 12 years ago

Wow you're right. I just setup my own VPS yesterday. Decided to check the auth logs and the first invalid user attempt occurred less than 3 hours from my first login.

The "POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!" message worried me for a bit but a little googling and the fact I've disabled password login calmed me down.

Presumably, changing my sshd port will drastically reduce these attempts right? Or do attackers routinely port scan servers?

ryan-c4• 12 years ago

So, some stats:

There's 350,032 unique passwords in there.

* 122,094 (~35%) are in the rockyou dump (which has 14,344,391 unique entries) * 2898 passwords in my list of cracked linkedin passwords, excluding those in the rockyou dump (2,002,484 unique entries) * 27,639 are in the phpbb dump i have (184,344 unique entries)

anonfunction• 12 years ago

I also detected 1893 palindromes out of 350064 total lines. Finally a (laughable) real-world use for my palindrome detection project[1].

[1] https://github.com/montanaflynn/palindromes/

Edit: I also pulled some more stats out of just the passwords:

  Total characters: 2938676
  Average character count: 8.39544955889747
  Median character count: 6
  Maximum character count: 294

ryan-c4• 12 years ago

Sorry about the formatting there sucking. :-(

machrider• 12 years ago

If you're running an ssh server that allows password authentication, make sure you're also running fail2ban.[1] Too many failed login attempts will block the IP (at an iptables level) for a configurable time period.

[1] http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

hoers2• 12 years ago

You also might want to consider changing your SSH Port

http://danielmiessler.com/blog/security-and-obscurity-does-c...

sireat• 12 years ago

As the author of that post says it greatly reduces the login attempts. It has been my experience as well.

An analogy with a house it would be like making a brick wall behind your front door and making a new door on the side of the house.

Sure, it would not change significantly the time for a determined thief wanting your house specifically,.

However moving the door would do wonders against some punk with a bunch of keys who runs around trying them on all neighborhood doors.

You still have to make sure you have a good lock and door.

ryan-c4• 12 years ago

I like pam_shield, personally.

https://github.com/jtniehof/pam_shield

Back in the day, disabling password auth but leaving keyboard_interactive on would stop a lot of these things, but I don't think that's true any more.

joshavant3• 12 years ago

If you're going for a security plan of obscurity (which, IMO, is what fail2ban is), I'd just change the SSH port, instead.

darklajid• 12 years ago

Now I'm confused. Why do you consider blocking someone that clearly is trying to brute force his way in 'obscure'?

jlgaddis3• 12 years ago

It's not obscurity, it's rate limiting.

SixSigma2• 12 years ago

Obscurity is a perfectly legitimate and valid security technique.

Relying on obscurity alone is the mistake you are alluding to.

Why wouldn't you recommend using fail2ban and changing the port?

trashcan• 12 years ago

http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-5567/...

Probably best to just whitelist SSH to known IPs.

colinbartlett• 12 years ago

Curious what you are pointing out here? Just the number? 8 security vilnerabities? What's the count at which I am supposed to stop using a product?

jlgaddis3• 12 years ago

On the BSDs, you can use "pf" to do this as well with the (minor) advantage that it doesn't require installing another piece of software.

CrLf• 12 years ago

You can do the same with nothing more than iptables on Linux (using "recent").

peteretep2• 12 years ago

Really no passwords with spaces in them, or a data-preparation error?

Terretta• 12 years ago

Defeat shoulder surfers -- just use n spaces and m spaces to spell your password in morse code, appearing as all spaces.

peteretep2• 12 years ago

I would be curious to know why this got downvoted. I went looking for "correct horse battery staple" and then realized that apparently the bots hadn't tried any passwords with spaces in them, but also that the patch uses spaces as a delimiter...

uzonite• 12 years ago

https://home.regit.org/2014/06/pshitt-collect-passwords-used...

feld• 12 years ago

Use 2 factor auth with ssh via Yubikey or TOTP and it doesn't matter if they try to brute force you

mrsteveman1• 12 years ago

I'm considering using those yubikey modes for ssh or local login on certain servers and in certain situations, though it requires some changes on each server to enable it.

I'm quite fond of the Yubikey NEO's openpgp applet paired with gpg-agent's ability to act as a compatible ssh-agent, allows standard SSH key login to any server with no server changes at all. I love the idea of my GPG and SSH key being truly portable in a very reasonably sized formfactor as well.

Patch to Log SSH Passwords – One Year Results

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