Digitalquill

Following the disaster that I has with the web/mail servers I have taken an additional step to secure the servers as I am still not clear what the causes of the failure were.

I have disabled direct root ssh login (which in debian is allowed by default) so you have to login as a non-privileged user and then su to root

to do this edit sshd_config

vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config

then find the line:

PermitRootLogin yes

and change it to

PermitRootLogin no

the restart ssh

/etc/init.d/ssh restart

Remember to make sure that you have a non-privileged account that works and you can su from that account to root before you do this.