Oh all of my configs are deny root ssh login or without-password. I noticed a significant decrease in scans when returning a root prompt when I did that. This was also in the mid 2000s so who knows how things would be in this day in age for a reduction in scans
@Pacmanlives
So it was a fake root prompt which tricked the bots into believing that they logged in successfully but in reality the prompt could do nothing on the system?
@Pacmanlives
Couldn’t you just disable root login in the sshd config?
Oh all of my configs are deny root ssh login or without-password. I noticed a significant decrease in scans when returning a root prompt when I did that. This was also in the mid 2000s so who knows how things would be in this day in age for a reduction in scans
@Pacmanlives
So it was a fake root prompt which tricked the bots into believing that they logged in successfully but in reality the prompt could do nothing on the system?
Correct