Pwning your web server the easy way or why exposing –/.ssh/ is a bad idea

Off topic but I personally find the use of the female pronouns in technical articles distracting. Referring to a hypothetical "Attacker" as "he" or "they" is what my brain expects which means I can parse the text faster and get to the point quicker. When the "attacker" is a "she" I'm surprised and the flow is interrupted. I'm forced to think about the fact that the author is signaling to me that they believe that women can be anything they want and shouldn't be boxed in into predetermined gender special professions etc.

Perhaps one might argue that this interruption is precisely the goal, and therein lies my point: I see this choice of words as a form of guerrilla advertisement by the author to showcase their agenda about a subject which has no relevance to the topic of the essay. Basically every "she" is a little ad for "Women's Rights" (for lack of a better term), and ads are annoying. Note that this has nothing to do with my personal opinion on the subject. It's just like mangling in an opinion about climate change, veganism etc. While legitimate and worthwhile, it shouldn't be purported as part of a technical article.

I'm obviously "zooming-in" a little on a minute matter, but nevertheless it's a minor pet peeve of mine. I wonder how others see this.

Only time will tell if I am in fact right. I'm counting on being more right than the guys who have dedicated staff who routinely shell into their servers.

I suppose we'll see if companies with sysadmins have more breaches than the guys who run their own ops using container orchestration etc. I think I'd go even odds $1k that over the next five years, most large scale data breaches will be at organizations where sys admins run the majority of ops.

There's a whole new category of errors you can make (making your bucket open, etc.) with cloud providers but the tooling has better defaults.

You can sometimes grab these ssh keys if the server has a severe directory traversal, local-file-inclusion vulnerability(run server/DB as root) , or to use for pivoting to different user/machine... But never heard of these being exposed outright.

why would www-data need a private key though?

I am agreeing with what you wrote, though. Or at least I am trying to.

I have seen numerous times the results of that, where for instance, a developer creating a tool decides that his interpretation of a bad requirement is satisfied in a poor way. Or a sysadmin deciding that a default configuration is good enough because he did `mv conf.example to conf`, and it works.

I guess what I am trying to say is that the learning curve given the complexity of software / systems now a days, and the lack of judgement and training by the users / developers / sysadmins of those systems results in decisions where risk is not taken in to account.

I miss the time where people genuinely knew what they were doing, and had a mindset that allowed them to avoid / prevent risk in the decisions they take during their daily tasks.