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"there's literally no good reason (besides laziness) to leave sshd exposed to the public internet."

Well, besides the fact that it's a whole lot more convenient to just be able to ssh into somewhere without frigging around with VPN or what not. For most businesses, I would say having accessible ssh (with good passwords, and a properly set up, up-to-date system) is fine.

But yeah, for a "security" business .. it's pretty surprising they let it hang out like that. And on port 22 and the www domain, too .. tsk tsk.



Security is not supposed to be convenient.

If there is an option between a convenient way to do something and an inconvenient (but much secure) way to do the same thing. You should do it the inconvenient way, specially if you make a living in security.


If you're at home, running OpenBSD on your own computer, then security can be inconvenient as you want it. But if you run security for a business, you have to balance confidentiality and integrity with availability (and sometimes some other concerns). Shell access from the internet could be important to availability--obviously, this was the wrong way to do it, but it wasn't a wrong objective.


So I'm guessing you mail hard drives around, rather than use the net 'cause somebody might have cracked sshd or OpenSSL? Wait, you don't? Gee.


I agree with your point, but I do want to point out that mail theft (by postal workers, errant receivers, and malicious thieves) is not so uncommon. I have had a few things mailed without tracking numbers that I strongly suspect were stolen (mailed from post offices with complaints of theft or undelivered mail).




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