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Gordon Henderson wrote: > No, but I bet they've had a break-in and are now bolting the doors... I'm inclined to agree. If no-one has broken in, how is changing the passwords going to change anything? It might help, short-term, if they don't know whether a system is compromised or not, or they think someone might have obtained password files. Unless they're concerned about weak passwords and have forced the system to disallow anything considered weak when the password is updated. But if that were the case, surely they could say so? > I get attacks on all my servers[1] all the time - FTP, POP3, SSH, etc. > It'll never go away, so the best thing you can do is make sure you have > very good passwords. I run "crack" & "john" regularly to make sure the > punters haven't put up something obvious, but it's only a matter of time > before someone's (win) PC gets hacked, a keylogger installed, then any > sort of good password, etc. that you might have goes out of the window. Or don't use passwords at all, preferably. I just wish more people could cope with the idea of generating a public/private keypair so we could do away with FTP altogether. > My experience is that most hackers are not intersted in reading your > email, etc. (unless you'r someone famous!) but more intersted in abusing a > server to send spam. Indeed. Only last week I cleaned a system up for someone who had a user's password guessed via POP3. That was then used to connect using SMTP-AUTH and spew a massive load of spam out through the server :( James -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html