I am panicing. I have no other explanation at this point. I am scared that I have been hacked.
I have three separate computers running ESXi 6.5 (old hardware). Today I was working without incident on one box. At some point I tried to login to the 2nd box. Both of my two accounts get the response of invalid login or password at both the web-frontend and DCUI. I still cannot get it. I tried to get into the 3rd and got the same issue. I opened a separate tab and tried to login to the first with the root account and got the same response - invalid username or password. Since I was still logged into the first in another tab, I changed my root account password.
I rebooted all three machines. I can get into the first using the changed password. I still cannot get into the second. And the third suffered a hardware hard drive failure and I cannot boot. That machine will probably be recycled.
The only thing I can think of that I did in the last 24 hours to the network is standup my own NTP server - a Raspberry Pi connected to a USB GPS unit.
Can anybody think of any way that this could have happened other than by manual human intervention?
I don't see any other indicators of hacking activity. And my question isn't about hacking in general, but specifically about the symptoms displayed by my three independent ESXi boxes.