This afternoon (4pm EST) I was doing some maintenance work on our server 
and suddenly my ssh telnet session dropped.  Attempts at reconnecting 
yielded a "certificate missing" error.  FTP, HTTP, and our email 
services (dovecot with amavisd/clamd/spamassassin and postfix with 
secure ldap) were slowing to a crawl.  It was very fortunate that I 
noted the issue, otherwise we might be "toast".

Our ISP got involved quickly, shut off all outside connections, and 
found that user "amavis" through a shell account had installed a new ssh 
client in /tmp, launched it, logged in, and then was apparently scanning 
to find the root password for the server.

Yikes!

It appears that the user amavis was not sent to /bin/false but instead 
/bin/sh!  We changed that right away.

I am now working through the security suggestions for amavisd but would 
appreciate any knowledgeable feedback (anyone here is way above my own) 
on this to make sure that such an erroneous configuration could lead to 
this issue.

/mark


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