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.
Good question. I have asking myself the same thing as well. In case of ssh it is possible to use 2FA with a security key, which is something I’d like to put in my todo.txt
you don’t and will never will. I would recommend reading a lecture by Ken Thompson the co-creator of Unix for more details on this https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
Self hosting personal photos doesn’t generally require opening anything up to the internet, so most backdoors would not be accessible by anyone but you.
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).
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.
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. But if there were well known backdoors to mainstream security practices we might see more companies that depend on security shutting down, or at least shutting down their online activities. Banks, stock trading, crypto exchanges, other enterprises that handle money, where hacking would be lucrative.
There’s a concept of acceptable levels of risk. Companies are not going to shut down out of fear, or miss out on the business opportunities of online presence. There’s money to be made.
Even with things as serious as spectre allowing full dumping of CPU and RAM contents simply by loading a website, I can’t think of a single company that just said “well shit, better just die”.
Serious, potentially business ending, security issues usually have a huge amount of effort when discovered put into mitigations and fixes. Mitigations are usually enough in the immediate “oh shit” phase. Defense in depth is standard practice.
