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Comment by ez77 | Hacker News Reader

I must admit I didn't know the big domains disabled ssh. Naive/beginner's question: how do programmers work remotely at these companies (if it's allowed at all)? Do they ssh into other (safe) servers, from which a safe transfer is eventually made into the production servers?

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You could set it up by allowing sshing to a server on a subdomain something like ssh.xyz.com or vpn.xyz.com and from there can ssh to production servers, which are set up to only allow ssh internally.

It's a matter of setting up VPNs and IP-restricting where you can SSH in from. You can also set up port knocking and other SSH-related security measures. It depends how much convenience you're willing to trade for security.

Practicality trumps everything, after 10+ years of using ssh and trying port knocking and everything else none of it works when you're 4000km away in another country with only a handheld to access the servers.

I think it should probably company policy at a financial institution not to allow someone in a different control on a handheld device to access the servers.

I use layered security (in the sense of servers) with a password lifetime of 10 days. I deal with servers daily and the issue of compromise has been twice in on firewall containers/servers which was fine as the systems in place found it, found the issue with the net facing software and I fixed it. Practicality doesn't mean no security.

If you're using SSH, you should be using keys, and not passwords.

Those aren't mutally exclusive

Can you require keys AND passwords? I haven't been able to figure out how to get that to function - if passwords are allowed, it lets you in with or without a key, from what I can tell. I'd be happy to be wrong though!

Generally you VPN in (using two-factor auth for PCI compliance) to a private network and can SSH in from there. Public facing SSH is generally a bad idea. Also it didn't seem like they had any firewall rules preventing brute forcing.

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