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The One Linux Security Habit That Saved Me From a Silent Breach
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Intro:
Not all breaches come crashing through the front door. Some slip in quietly, change nothing obvious, and leave no visible trace — until it’s too late. I nearly learned that the hard way. But one small habit, repeated daily, saved my server from silent compromise. I’m sharing it here so you can make it yours too.
What Happened:
A few months ago, I logged into one of my production servers and noticed something subtle: a strange delay after authentication. Everything else looked fine — CPU was calm, disk was quiet, logs were normal. But I trusted my gut and ran my usual check.
That’s when I found it: A suspicious cron job added under a low-privilege user. It ran a base64-decoded script every 12 hours from /tmp/.cache/, and piped outbound data using curl. No alerts. No spikes. Just data slowly leaking out.
The Habit That Caught It:
Every day — before doing anything else — I run this:
sudo crontab -lfor user in $(cut -f1 -d: /etc/passwd); do crontab -l -u $user 2>/dev/null; done
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