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From: "Wouter" <wouter@spierenburg.net>
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References: <4226C4DF.3050806@winbot.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 10:22:05 +0100
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Subject: Re: Renaming root account
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Renaming root is generally a bad idea, what you could do, however, is set a
password on(thus enabling) the "toor" account and set root's shell to
/sbin/nologin

Wouter
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Craig Edwards" <brain@winbot.co.uk>
To: <freebsd-security@freebsd.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2005 09:03
Subject: Renaming root account


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> Hash: SHA1
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> One quick question: Is it safe and/or sensible to rename the root
> account, so that the only uid 0 user on a system is something different
> to root? I can see how this would be effective against external
> attackers who have no knowledge of the internals of the system as they
> would spend pointless hours trying to crack a user which doesnt exist,
> however to internal users they could always just cat /etc/passwd and see
> that root has been renamed. So firstly, is this possible, and security
> wise is it of any real use? Can anyone think of any apps it would break
> that assume that the uid 0 user is called root and don't just address
> the user by its uid?
>
> Thanks,
> Craig Edwards
>
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