[tialaramex]

Breaking a 1024-bit RSA key for SSH is a lot of effort for a very minimal reward.

The benefit if you do this is now you can impersonate the key's owner for new connections. So if it's a host key you can pretend to be that host if you're able to get on path between a victim and the real host, if it's a user key you can log in as that user with public key authentication.

But that's an active attack and an expensive key break.

Breaking 1024-bit RSA for HTTPS servers was a much juicier target because you can passively snoop RSA kex in TLS 1.2 and older. But that's not a thing in SSH, it's active attacks only.