On 01/12/2015 08:05 AM, P J P wrote:
Again, issue being addressed is not of brute force
attacks. But that of such attacks resulting in gaining 'root'
access to remote machines. They are two distinct issues.
There still needs to be an administrative access to the system, and
the most common implementation by enabling 'sudo' on the
non-privileged account. So, in a sense you are both right: this
feature is just a small step rather than a security panaceum, but it
does bring real improvements in several areas:
- increases difficulty of the attack by banning stupid automated BF
attacks on root
- improves accountability for administrative actions (we know which
admin messed up :)
- allows more granularity in granting elevated privileges across a
set of machines and admins