This was going to go into a Lazy Reading post, but then I realized it shouldn’t.  Here’s the source: “A Tragically Comedic Security Flaw in MySQL” (via)

The short version: MySQL, compiled a certain way, will allow 1 out of 256 root login attempts to work no matter what.  I was going to link to this for the startlingly large number of MySQL installations found allowing connections from the public Internet, which means breaking into any affected servers would be easy.  Then I thought about it…  I don’t see a my.cnf installed by pkgsrc for at least MySQL 5.1 by default.

To fix this for your own installation, put

[mysqld]

bind-address=127.0.0.1

in /usr/pkg/etc/my.cnf to disallow remote connections.  I don’t know if MySQL on DragonFly from pkgsrc is vulnerable to the issue, but it’s a good idea to not allow remote connections to the database, and ought to be on by default.

Or just use Postgres, if possible.