this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
99 points (70.9% liked)
Technology
59534 readers
3195 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
People are giving some advice but it doesn't seem appropriate for an absolute newbie. Here's what I'd say. Absolutely do not run telnet. Because it's so insecure and everyone knows that, it's usually not on by default, and you would have had to start it yourself somehow. It's unlikely that you did that, but you can check to see.
If you're new, you very likely don't need an SSH server running. Unless you're logging into that computer remotely, you don't need it. It's probably not running, but it's conceivable that it could run by default. Check to see and disable it if you don't need remote login.
If you do need remote login, use SSH and use a very good password. Ideally, you'd need to leave newbie territory and use public-private keys instead of a password. It's also not a bad idea to use a nonstandard port, instead of 22. That doesn't beef security much, but many scanners are going to look for 22 and nothing else.
Thank you for the well thought out response! I, myself do know my way around networking a bit. Linux in general is what I am just now dipping my toes in. Loving it and learning a lot.
To add to this, install fail2ban (most distros have it in their package system) and activate it for the various things that use username/passwords in your system.
Basically it monitors access logs and blocks the IPs that repeatedly fail logins.l for a certain amount of time.
This drastically reduces the effectiveness of brute force attempts - as long as your password isn't, "password" and guessable in one go.