Running Alpine? You sure? Are your containers running Alpine? If so, pretty good chance anyone can log in via SSH.
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I use alpine with an ssh port exposed to the internet so I can connect to it. This doesn’t seem to be an issue if you configured your settings to be secure.
Never use just default settings.
I wouldn’t recommend deploying any ssh server without reviewing the config and believe sane defaults are sane.
People use * as an account password, or sysadmins allow that? I’d never allow that on any system or service of mine. No surprise, like most of these LLM discovered issues in the media lately, it hasn’t come up before. 💯 Good they’re getting fixed, but nothing so far has really been that urgent to fix for me.
No,
\*is being put as a hash of a password, originally precisely because that would mean no actual hash (over any input) ever matches it.Ah got it, so is that a hack to prevent a specific user from logging in rather than something like:
Match User <username> PasswordAuthentication no
How is crashing on an unhandled path in a security context not better?!
This isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was. Also the author is very reliant on AI to the point where they didn’t think about what if someone wipes the logs.
Any effected devices should be wiped and redeployed
The only container i have that has a reachable SSH port is forgejo, and even then it’s only local traffic and i’d have to check if it even uses alpine. All others also don’t have SSH enabled.
The vulnerability doesn’t seem too bad tbh.
I mean, anybody who’s still using password login for SSH is kind of asking for it.
OP I know you’re trying to do good, but please try to understand the vulnerability before spreading FUD
Yeah fair, sorry about that. The intro + where I originally learned this from made me overreact a bit, it seems.
Why would a local server even have open internet access though?
This alerts feel more relevant for public facing servers.
did you get hacked? check.
$ grep “Accepted password” /var/log/messages
That’s a really bad check unless you have an external box receiving logs and you’re looking there, because the first thing that a sophisticated attacker is going to do if they get in as root is remove the signs of their presence.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code LXC Linux Containers SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #159 for this comm, first seen 5th Nov 2026, 15:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
If I’m running containers on Alpine, doesn’t that mean that they already don’t offer SSH (sshd)? The entire point of Alpine as a base is to not add stuff you don’t need.
Unless you are running openssh with password authentication on Musl you are not impacted by this
Everything behind a good firewall and proxy.
No public facing url should ever not be proxied.
Only ports you explicitly forward. Ever.
Most containers don’t run ssh right?
Unless it’s explicitly installed no. The default Alpine image doesn’t come with OpenSSH.
I’m no cybersecurity expert, but from what I’ve heard from those who are, this is the new normal as anyone who formerly had no chance due to being a “script kiddie” can now just prompt an AI to “hack this system” and eventually find a vulnerability.
The way it works is that finding vulnerabilities required a lot of technical understanding and mental effort. A software could have a glaring hole in it for years without anyone finding out simply due to nobody really looking. AI just gives you the ability to do rudimentary exploit analysis around the clock without having to spend your own time. This is a wake up call to anyone making software in sloppy fashion.
But it isn’t quite as easy as saying “AI hack into this service”, if the person doing the hacking is using the same model as the person who made the service, and that person already asked the AI to do that and fixed the resulting exploit prior to release.
Even projects that use AI in a limited fashion to code or even not at all, often use AI to at least do some red team stuff prior to release.
I don’t really foresee any way this doesn’t even out eventually.
It’s not quite as simple as that. The author in this case followed a pretty specific trail to find the bug.
Where AI helped was as the last step. They already knew what the bug would do and where to look, but actually looking through the source code for all the possible musl implementations out there would have taken a lot of time.
So they brute-forced it instead and asked AI to spin up actual running instances of all those implementations and simply tried the bug against each of them, rather than looking at all the code.
Fair enough, but the overall idea stands:
The bar has been significantly lowered for what it takes to hack.
That’s because it turns out there are tons of vulnerabilities out there introduced by very lazy and/or dumb code.
It isn’t that AI has lowered the bar for hacking, it’s that it’s showing us just how much bad code is out there. The bar was already on the ground, we just didn’t know it.
After all is said and done AI will actually end up raising the bar for security everywhere.
Unfortunately we have a lot of legacy crap to clean first.
You’re doing mental gymnastics to argue with me. Let’s try what I said worded differently in a way that hopefully helps you realize we agree:
It is now easier to hack.
Yep, those new fangled slop-kitties. The worst part is that there brute force hacking is being subsidized by people 401ks.
The irony - of course - is that their 401k money goes right into hacking those same people’s 401ks.
… but at least we can brainrot an entire generation with glass fruit slices and put artists out of work?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go convince someone that the TikTok deepfakes they’re watching aren’t real and that cops don’t really employ nanny-boo-boos to unsettle criminals during interrogations. No, I’m not joking.
