Returning back home. I get this buzz on my phone. Turns out it’s an email from Linode. Daym. I thought was I billed already? Trust me on this, I was really not sure what to do of this for the first two minutes when I read the email. I opened the Linode admin panel to check out what was my server up to. And the CPU graph had jumped off the hooks. Same was the case with the network graph Looking at the network log’s suggested a high amount of outbound traffic coming from my server, further cementing the Linode support ticket that I got. I ssh’d inside my server to see what was going on. I will be damned. I don’t remember sleep typing my password continuously for that long! Let me tell you, you don’t do a cat /var/log/secure at this point as the file would just be spit continously at you with no end of stopping. Did head (even a tail can do) to it. Going through the start of the file, everything was fine until I started to see the extremely less epoch time between two failed attempts. This confirmed my hunch that some script kiddie was trying to brute force through the root user login. /var/log/secure Fulled to brim I know, I should have disabled root login at the start and used ssh-keys to access my server. But I just delayed it to be done the next day. My fault. The logical thing now would be to start iptables (or) ufw and block outbound traffic as well… Read more