Linux Journal: Doing It All with OpenSSH, Part 1 May 30, 2003, 08 :30 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (10648 reads) (Other stories by Marcel Gagné)
Way back when, on this very corner, I did a series of articles on encryption and hiding your tracks, something I called the High Tech How Not to be Seen. In that series, I talked about the dangers of plain-text communications to security. Here's a quick recap for those who still might be connecting to remote systems using telnet. Anyone running a program like sniffit (reptile.rug.ac.be/~coder/sniffit/sniffit.html) can snoop on every packet sailing across your network. If you are logging in using telnet, that person can see your user name and password plain as day...
"One way around this dilemma is to use the secure shell. OpenSSH is an open-source implementation of the secure shell protocol that comes with almost every major Linux distribution. You can run out to www.openssh.org to get the latest and greatest, but you probably already have it on your system. That said, keeping up to date with the latest version of OpenSSH is essential if you want to maintain security. So, if your version of OpenSSH is more than a few months old, you may want to consider checking for an update.
"The secure shell is more than a simple way to keep your passwords to yourself. In this series, I take you from the basics through some nifty features that should make you wonder why you use anything else to communicate (well, almost)..."
