I have been thinking about self-hosting my personal photos on my linux server. After the recent backdoor was detected I’m more hesitant to do so especially because i’m no security expert and don’t have the time and knowledge to audit my server. All I’ve done so far is disabling password logins and changing the ssh port. I’m wondering if there are more backdoors and if new ones are made I can’t respond in time. Appreciate your thoughts on this for an ordinary user.
How do you know what you don’t know?
That’s basically what you’re asking. If you have an answer to that general question, it will answer your specific question.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
We don’t know. However, no one cares about your personal photos ; no one will ever attempt to hack you specifically unless you’re a high value target (in which case, stop hosting your photos anywhere immediately)
The only thing that could get your photos is if an undiscovered backdoor is exploited by someone doing some sort of a mass attack. As far as I know, they’re pretty rare, because people with the means to do them generally have a specific set of people they care about (which you are unlikely to be a part of).
unfortunately, mass attacks happen all the time. if you ever had access to the authentication logs of an SSH server with an unfirewalled port 22 into the internet that has been running for a few months, you would see international IPs starting port scans and brute force attacks. there is always someone out there trying to hack random IPs. it’s fucking wild west out there.
no one will ever attempt to hack you
My brother in Christ, how do you think botnets get built?
We don’t know. However, no one cares about your personal photos ; no one will ever attempt to hack you specifically unless you’re a high value target (in which case, stop hosting your photos anywhere immediately)
To those assumptions I would say : we don’t know. Personal vendettas do exist and we cannot look into the minds of individuals going crazy neither.
How do you know there isn’t a logic bug that spills server secrets through an uninitialized buffer? How do you know there isn’t an enterprise login token signing key that accidentally works for any account in-or-out of that enterprise (hard mode: logging costs more than your org makes all year)? How do you know that your processor doesn’t leak information across security contexts? How do you know that your NAS appliance doesn’t have a master login?
This was a really, really close one that was averted by two things. A total fucking nerd looked way too hard into a trivial performance problem, and saw something a bit hinky. And, just as importantly, the systemd devs had no idea that anything was going on, but somebody got an itchy feeling about the size of systemd’s dependencies and decided to clean it up. This completely blew up the attacker’s timetable. Jia Tan had to ship too fast, with code that wasn’t quite bulletproof (5.6.0 is what was detected, 5.6.1 would have gotten away with it).
In the coming weeks, you will know if this attacker recycled any techniques in other attacks. People have furiously ripped this attack apart, and are on the hunt for anything else like it out there. If Jia has other naughty projects out here and didn’t make them 100% from scratch, everything is going to get burned.
I think the best assurance is - even spies have to obey certain realities about what they do. Developing this backdoor costs money and manpower (but we don’t care about the money, we can just print more lol). If you’re a spy, you want to know somebody else’s secrets. But what you really want, what makes those secrets really valuable, is if the other guy thinks that their secret is still a secret. You can use this tool too much, and at some point it’s going to “break”. It’s going to get caught in the act, or somebody is going to connect enough dots to realize that their software is acting wrong, or some other spying-operational failure. Unlike any other piece of software, this espionage software wears out. If you keep on using it until it “breaks”, you don’t just lose the ability to steal future secrets. Anybody that you already stole secrets from gets to find out that “their secrets are no longer secret”, too.
Anyways, I think that the “I know, and you don’t know that I know” aspect of espionage is one of those things that makes spooks, even when they have a God Exploit, be very cautious about where they use it. So, this isn’t the sort of thing that you’re likely to see.
What you will see is the “commercial” world of cyberattacks, which is just an endless deluge of cryptolockers until the end of time.
Even if there are nation state level backdoors, your personal server is not a valuable enough target to risk exposing them. Just use common sense, unattended-upgrades, and don’t worry too much about it.
Check the source or pay someone to do it.
If you’re using closed source software, its best to assume it has backdoors and there’s no way to check.
