Question
Recover from Compromised Droplet
- Posted April 9, 2014
Hi there,
I got an alert that my droplet had been probing other sites for security holes. I emailed back and forth with the Digital Ocean support team, and they said “compromised droplets are backdoored and you will likely need to delete the droplet.”
Two questions:
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How could this have happened? I thought I had secure passwords for my ssh access and for mysql. Were there other passwords I needed to be aware of?
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How do I delete the droplet and make a new one? Is there anything I should be aware of concerning the compromised account? Could they have inserted files or something into my Wordpress blog database? Everything still looks normal.
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There are many aspects to security. I’m a newbie myself, but I can tell you there is a lot more to securing a server than just making a good ssh and mysql password. Everything from closing any unnecessary open ports, to stopping unnecessary services, changing the default port of your ssh, there are whole books devoted to these issues also there are anti-virus scanners that you can run.