Users. What the hell you mean by “root”?
Are you a Windows user? I bet you have the user account badly configured. By default Windows is installed under the Administrator account. And nobody bothers to change this and add a second account. That second account should be an underprivileged one. If you own the computer you always know the Admin´s password, so anytime you need it (aka installing software) you can type it and still be using a less privileged account. Why is this important? Well… how many hacks could’ve been stopped just because the account in use weren’t the Admin’s but a regular user one?
Running any computer device with all its power unfolded is not the most secure way to do things. If you happen to miss type something, click on the wrong option, etc you can cause damage on the system. And if any malicious attack gets into the Admin user it can be utter harmful. If you are a Mac user, or a Windows 10 user, you may have wondered a few times why the system asks for your password for some tasks and not for others. This is to prevent creepy things happening to your computer and the user lack of knowledge. These systems have built a way for your “normal” user account to escalate privileges up to the superuser account (read root) and do whatever you want to the system.
In the UNIX world the root account is the more or less equivalent as the Administrator account in Windows. In the FreeBSD installation in particular, when a new user is added a question about what group should that user be added to appears. The group for you should be the wheel group. The ones in the wheel will be able to escalate their privileges and become root for certain tasks at certain times. The rest of the time they will be regular users. If you happen to be a GNU/Linux user it’s pretty easy you’re an Ubuntu user. The root account is locked in a similar fashion to the Mac or Windows. You can only become root if you ask for it and introduce your password account. Other distributions such as Debian (Ubuntu is a Debian derivative) allow you to have a non-locked root account as in commercial UNIX or FreeBSD.
For deeper knowledge on this topic there is lots of literature. And the FreeBSD handbook is an excellent starting point.
If you find the articles in Adminbyaccident.com useful to you, please consider making a donation.
Use this link to get $200 credit at DigitalOcean and support Adminbyaccident.com costs.
Get $100 credit for free at Vultr using this link and support Adminbyaccident.com costs.
Mind Vultr supports FreeBSD on their VPS offer.