Renaming root account

[Craig Edwards]

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Hi everyone,

One quick question: Is it safe and/or sensible to rename the root
account, so that the only uid 0 user on a system is something different
to root? I can see how this would be effective against external
attackers who have no knowledge of the internals of the system as they
would spend pointless hours trying to crack a user which doesnt exist,
however to internal users they could always just cat /etc/passwd and see
that root has been renamed. So firstly, is this possible, and security
wise is it of any real use? Can anyone think of any apps it would break
that assume that the uid 0 user is called root and don't just address
the user by its uid?

Thanks,
Craig Edwards

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