A dude with a THICK Russian accent just called me offering server security services.

After I politely declined, he insisted on a free audit of my servers. I declined that as well.

Now I’m backing up our DB’s and going through my nginx logs.

Am I being racist?

No, you are carefully :)

Russian is not a race. Just like disliking religions doesn't make you a racist. SJWs want you to think that though. Don't give in :) just decline suspicious offers.

@Yamemori kinda hard to tell from a call 😂😂

It's better to be safe than sorry.

Fun fact, my server had a few thousand failed logins from russian IPs every day

@karmak I limit IP’s that can access my port 22 just to my workplace. You should do it, it’s scary how many people try root login.

No because being Russian is not a race...

In the cases where it doesn't sound like its 'racist' , the better terminology that can be used is 'discriminatory'. But in your situation, you're not being discriminatory, you're being cautious. And that's good.

I typically get Chinese IPs trying to spread communism to my servers.

Haven't had any Russian IPs try yet.

@mzeffect Most people use racism as a shorter term for "discrimination against those who look different" anyway, let's not be pedantic. But yes, is agree that this is the correct response no matter what the person sounded like.

@Root that was the laugh of the day, thanks 😂

@irene I remember we have one here too (he had a yellow avatar background and was called something like heisenberg or einstein), but why would that be surprising?

Obviously, as mentioned above, Russian is not a race. Slavic is.
Just like a religion is not a race.

But let's be real - do you hate Russians? No, then you're not a racist. You're just cautious.

Just like I don't have anything against the Chinese, yet I'm aware of the fact that they hack, reverse-engineer and etc. So I am always careful when working with an external Chinese service.

Same here - hacking is extremely popular in Russia, and it's being done regularly. So you are being careful.

@sslPoodle not to come off as an idiot, I wouldn’t allow root ssh even if AWS didn’t disable it by default.

@iam13islucky 🙌 thank you! Got a bit annoyed by everyone correcting me.

You're not
Russians - > hacking
Indians - > tech support scam
Nigerians - > email fraud

@African @Root Chinese - > Spreading communism to servers

I think it's a British thing to use the word, "racism"' to refer to prejudice against people of the same color, but of different cultures. I've even seen the term used by someone from Newcastle complaining about jokes from someone from Sheffield. Aren't those cities like 150 miles apart?

@amahlaka automatic backups run daily at 12 am, which means that my data (at the time) had not been backed up for 13 hours.

Also, automatic backups are stored on AWS, but what if they found a way into my AWS account, so I wanted a copy locally.

And before anyone says this, I have 2-step verification enabled on AWS, but what if even that was compromised.

@arturgrigio Limited paranoia is great for security. Just be sure not to fall off the edge!

@Root hahaha 😅 thanks for the laugh.