Strong passwords no panacea as SSH Brute-Force Attacks Rise

 ( 202 days 15 hours ago)

LinuxSecurity.com: Thanks to the end-of-term for many colleges and some K12 schools, brute-force attacks against SSH servers surged sharply this past weekend, according to the SANS Internet Storm Center. The sudden jump in SSH attacks merits a re-examination of how such servers should be properly secured. Jim Owens and Jeanna Matthews of the Department of Computer Science at Clarkson University have published a paper on the methods that such attacks frequently employ and on the best ways to defeat them. Brute-force attacks gets a lot of attention in the press but do we really need to study it? Yes, with botnet and more powerful computers it makes brute-force attacks more affective. However, if users use strong passwords then the likely hood that they will be hacked by this type of attack goes down drastically.