Locked root account, many prpasswd restarts

From: Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser <hans.ekkehard.plesser_at_nlh.no>
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 16:37:07 +0100

Hi!

I am managing a GS1280 under Tru64 V5.1B PK3 with C2 security. Recently, the
following problem occured:

1. An attacker attempted a large number of ssh-logins to the root account.
After 100 failed attempts, the account was automatically locked. I
discovered this on Friday night via a remote connection, but the lock
probably occured a few days earlier.

2. On Monday morning, another adminstrator tried to log in directly on the
machine, but received a message that only console logins were permitted.

3. Monday afternoon, su from privileged user accounts to root were possible
again. In the auth.log, I found the following messages:

Aug 23 14:21:45 caspar syslog: auth_lrpc_putent: prpasswdd timeout on
validated connection
Aug 23 14:21:45 caspar prpasswdd[657]: restarting after child received signal:
11
Aug 23 14:21:45 caspar prpasswdd[371322]: prpasswdd: Recovering the log: last
valid LSN: file: 1 offset 966056
Aug 23 14:21:45 caspar prpasswdd[371322]: now active and servicing client
requests

These messages started at 9:06, when my colleague first tried to log in on the
machine and continued every five minutes until 14:41, when the machine opened
up again for root. Since then, the message has not appeared again.

Being rather new to Tru64 administration, I wonder what the above message
wants to tell me.

Thank you in advance for your advice!
Hans
Received on Mon Aug 23 2004 - 15:49:09 NZST

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