SNMP is used for remote monitoring and configuration of dedicated servers. If you have not changed the default community string of 'public' or 'private', your server may be abused to conduct DDOS attacks. In addition, publicly accessible SNMP can leak information about your server. We suggest using hard to guess community strings.
On Linux machines, SNMP is commonly run through the net-snmp library:
- Open your snmpd.conf file (usually /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf)
- Find the line that looks like: 'com2sec notConfigUser default public' (the line will begin with com2sec and end with a password. In this example, the password is 'public')
- Change the 'public' at the end of the line to a more secure password
- Restart the SNMP server with: 'service snmpd restart'
