Telnet is Death

If you're a sysadmin of a UNIX system that allows telnet access, then you might as well be posting your root username and password on a billboard over the next global hacker convention as you clearly have no concern for remote access security. Telnet has long been known to be incredibly insecure as it's vulnerable to eavesdropping. You should require all clients connecting to your system to do so through only secure connections, such as SSH tunnels. Furthermore, you should not allow remote root access even through an SSH connection. You can still perform administrative tasks remotely, but if you do so by first logging in using ssh as a normal user and then using su root, you'll be safer than simply by sshing as root.