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.
Good thing there hasn’t been any remotely exploitable security bugs in any of the mail system components in the 6 years since Debian 7 went EoL
https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/
Depending on how it was configured it may or not be have been compromised. Probably better to go the nuclear option.
That was a good test run. I think it’s time to put it into production.
I’m fairly certain that SSH and whatever else you’re exposing has had vulnerabilities fixed since then, especially if modern distros refuse to use the ssh key you were using, this screams of “we found something so critical here we don’t want to touch it”. If your server exposes anything in a standard port, e.g. SSH on 22, you probably should do a fresh install (although I would definitely not know how to rebuild a system I built almost 20 years ago).
That being said, it’s amazing that an almost 20 year old system can work for almost 10 years without touching anything.
The amount of dos systems I have seen powering critical infrastructure in banks and hospitals is quite frankly nightmare fuel.
You send mail to Gmail and Hotmail and it’s actually accepted? How?
Patience. It really helps to have all the latest set up: SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Then after that it’s a matter of IP reputation, you can email the various blocklists and you wait for the rest of them to clear on their own.
I’ve had that IP for 10 years and it has never sent spam, and I’ve sent enough emails that people open that it actually does get through fine. I haven’t had to think about it for a long time, it just keeps on working. Barely had to even adjust my Postfix config through the upgrades.
This is true. If you have DMARC and your RUA set up (with a working email (or one that doesn’t bounce at least)) along with SPF and DKIM, Google and MS will accept your mail. The only time it won’t at that point is if your IP is in the same /24 as a known spammer but so long as the spam stops, you’ll fall off the list. Some of the common spamlists allow you to request your IP be removed by request and I can only recall one list that almost nobody uses that makes you pay for the removal though there may be more I don’t recall.
