sshd possible breakin attempt messages

Brad Gilmer bgilmer at gilmer.org
Mon Feb 6 08:23:11 PST 2006


Hello all,

I guess one of the banes of our existance as Sys Admins is that people are always pounding away at our systems trying to break in.  Lately, I have been getting hit with several hundred of the messages below per dayin my security report output...

gilmer.org login failures:
Feb  5 11:18:17 gilmer sshd[78078]: reverse mapping checking getaddrinfo for 206-171-37-232.ded.pacbell.net failed - POSSIBLE BREAKIN ATTEMPT!
Feb  5 11:18:18 gilmer sshd[78080]: reverse mapping checking getaddrinfo for 206-171-37-232.ded.pacbell.net failed - POSSIBLE BREAKIN ATTEMPT!
Feb  5 11:18:20 gilmer sshd[78082]: reverse mapping checking getaddrinfo for 206-171-37-232.ded.pacbell.net failed - POSSIBLE BREAKIN ATTEMPT!

I am running FreeBSD 5.4 RELEASE, and right now this box is not a production machine, but I am going to be taking it live fairly soon.  Questions:

1)  Is there anything I should be doing to thwart this particular attack?
2)  Given that I am on 5.4, should I upgrade my sshd or do anything else at this point to make sure my machine is as secure as possible?
3)  (Meta-question) - Should I upgrade to 6.0 before I go live to be sure I am in the best possible security situation going forward?  Should I wait until 6.1 for bug fixes (generally I am opposed to n.0 anything).

Thanks
Brad


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