In the past two weeks I set up a new VPS, and I run a small experiment. I share the results for those who are curious.
Consider that this is a backup server only, meaning that there is no outgoing traffic unless a backup is actually to be recovered, or as we will see, because of sshd.
I initially left the standard “port 22 open to the world” for 4-5 days, I then moved sshd to a different port (still open to the whole world), and finally I closed everything and turned on tailscale. You find a visualization of the resulting egress traffic in the image. Different colors are different areas of the world. Ignore the orange spikes which were my own ssh connections to set up stuff.
Main points:
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there were about 10 Mb of egress per day due just to sshd answering to scanners. Not to mention the cluttering of access logs.
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moving to a non standard port is reasonably sufficient to avoid traffic and log cluttering even without IP restrictions
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Tailscale causes a bit of traffic, negligible of course, but continuous.
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I opened a raw text channel on the Telnet port for a personal game engine project and someone tried to enable commands and do some shady stuff. Unfortunately for them, that’s not a valid chess move.
Just do it properly and configure sshd securely. When you have a machine exposed to the internet, you should expect it to be attacked. If you really want to give the finger to bots, run endlessh on port 22 and keep sshd on a non-standard port. Stay safe.
endlessh
Lmao thanks for this
If you do want to open 22, and there are plenty of good reasons to want to, just implement something called port knocking and you can do it safely.
Note with this you still need good authentication. That means no passwords, key based auth only.
10mb is pretty much nothing. May as well just use Fail2Ban.
I don’t know if it was mentioned already but how could I check if my ports are under “attack”? OPs graphic looks really nice
Hi, to check attacks you should look at the logs. In this case auth.log. Being attacked on port 22 is not surprising neither really troublesome if you connect via key pair.
My graph was showing egress traffic, on any kind of server the traffic due to these attacks would have been invisible but on a backup server which has (hopefully) only ingress you can clearly see the volume of connections from attackers from bytes teansmitted
The best reason is reducing attack surface. It’s such an easy thing to do. I don’t know why people still expose services they don’t need to.
Throw CrowdSec on there to stop the bots before they can do anything
And yet it is more likely that tailscale get owned since the reward is much higher. I take my chances with my secured openssh server at port 22 vs a 3rd party company who controlls the access.
Just setup a wireguard system that’s pretty bulletproof
So is SSH
Wireguard doesn’t respond but I agree open-ssh is pretty solid. Can’t speak for any of the other ssh implementations. It can also be poorly configured. Like you could use a password
The benefit of Wireguard is that if you screw it up, it just won’t work. It basically enforces security.
Well, unless you tried to use the original PFSense module.
What software did you use you monitor this? I am newish to self hosting and would like to secure my connection better.
Sorry, it’s the built-in console of Google Cloud. But there are so many monitoring solution around that you can probably find one of your liking. Look on awesome-selfhosted for “monitoring”
Public key auth, and fail2ban on an extremely strict mode with scaling bantime works well enough for me to leave 22 open.
Fail2ban will ban people for even checking if the port is open.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access UDP User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
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Good bot!
