Apparently I installed that thing in 2006 and I last updated it in 2016, then I quit updating it for some reason that I totally forgot. Probably laziness…
It’s been running for quite some time and we kind of forgot about it in the closet, until the SSH tunnel we use to get our mail outside our home stopped working because modern openssh clients refuse to use the antiquated key cipher I setup client machines with way back when any longer.
I just generated new keys with a more modern cipher that it understands (ecdsa-sha2-nistp256) and left it running. Because why not 🙂
Because why not 🙂
Because security.
It’s behind a firewall. The only thing exposed to the outside is port 22 - and only pubkey login too.
And gee dude… It’s been running for 18 years without being pwned 🙂
I’d still maybe build a modern OpenSSH package.
There’s been an awful lot of RCEs in the past two decades and uh, if that’s rawdogging the internet, I’m honestly shocked you haven’t been hit with any by now.
Eh, building anything modern on a system that old would be painful I bet.
Maybe you could use https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable since that’s meant to be portable. I’d certainly would give it a try if I didn’t want to bother trying to upgrade that system. Then again, trying to upgrade it through the releases to a modern Debian might be fun too.
Did you really only use it when you were home? If you used it outside the firewall then port 25 must have been open also.
I used to run my own server and this was in the early 90s. Then one day, perusing the logs I realized I was not smart enough on the security front to even attempt such a thing. It was quickly shut down and the MX record moved to an outsourced mail provider.
Most ‘hackers’ are just mid tier (mediocre) IT level types who rely on existing exploits floating around in the wild. It’d probably be hard to find any still in circulation for such an old system.
We’re not talking about some punch card COBOL machine he jimmy rigged with network access, it’s an Debian 7Linux box with SSH enabled.
It’s not like Metasploit would have a tough time finding unpatched vulnerabilities for it…
It isn’t the “hackers” you should worry about. Its the nation states that take over huge numbers of machines.
If the NSA (GCHQ here in the UK) want my emails they’re getting it either way, I’m not able to stop nation states
As a private person, defending against nation threat actors is impossible. And not only as a private person, but even as a medium sized company.
