Failed Attempts for root User

Wow, things are much worse than I expected!

I'm reinstalling one of the dedicated hosts for Tech Stack. Kicked off the reinstall with CentOS 8 and came back a few hours later, to see this:

[greys@s1 ~]$ su -
Password:
Last login: Tue Feb  4 01:09:22 CET 2020 on pts/1
Last failed login: Tue Feb  4 01:22:33 CET 2020 from 222.186.30.35 on ssh:notty
There were 84 failed login attempts since the last successful login.

This means that on average there's 6 login attempts per minute… A good few hundred attempts each hour!

Definitely should switch to key-based SSH logins and deploy fail2ban as the priority!

See Also

• Use fail2ban to protect SSH
• SSH reference
• SSH port
• Generate SSH key