Hi, recently (ironically, right after sharing some of my posts here on Lemmy) I had a higher (than usual, not high in general) number of “attacks” to my website (I am talking about dumb bots, vulnerability scanners and similar stuff). While all of these are not really critical for my site (which is static and minimal), I decided to take some time and implement some generic measures using (mostly) Crowdsec (fail2ban alternative?) and I made a post about that to help someone who might be in a similar situation.

The whole thing is basic, in the sense that is just a way to reduce noise and filter out the simplest attacks, which is what I argue most of people hosting websites should be mostly concerned with.

  • 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    4 months ago

    Good read.

    I would just like to add some additional information that favors changing your SSH port to something other than the default. When crawlers are going around the internet looking for vulnerable SSH servers, they’re more than likely going to have an IP range and specifically look for port 22.

    Now can they go through and scan your IP and all of its ports to look for the SSH service? Yes. But you will statistically have less interactions with bad actors this way since they might specifically be looking for port 22.

    • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      As a side note, don’t be cute and pick port 221 or 2222 or 22022 or whatever that’s got “22” in it.

      I know that sounds silly but the slightly less stupid bots are written by people who understand people do things like that and account for them, and thus port 2222 isn’t actually better than 22, or whatever.

      • kitnaht@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        4 months ago

        imho - never expose that shit anyways, and VPN into your local network first. Only thing I ever expose to the internet is 80/443.

        At the very least, if you’re going to expose an SSH session to the internet, set up some sort of port-knocking. It’s security by obscurity, sure - but it will keep all but the most ardent intruders out.

        • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
          1·
          4 months ago

          Agreed, but sometimes you have to expose things you’d rather not; I just figured I’d mention that almost everyone’s immediate urge to just go ‘port 2222! that’ll do it!’ isn’t exactly better than doing nothing anymore.

    • loudwhisper@infosec.pubOPEnglish
      6·
      4 months ago

      Thanks! I did mention this briefly, although I belong to the school that “since I am anyway banning IPs that fail authentication a few times, it’s not worth changing the port”. I think that it’s a valid thing especially if you ingest logs somewhere, but if you do don’t choose 2222! I have added a link to shodan in the post, which shows that almost everybody who changes port, changes to 2222!

      • LostXOR@fedia.io
        5·
        4 months ago

        Yeah, I just left my SSH port as 22 since I only use key-based authentication so there’s really no security risk. Plus, it’s funny going through the logs and looking at all the login attempts.

        • loudwhisper@infosec.pubOPEnglish
          1·
          4 months ago

          Yep I agree. Especially looking at all the usernames that are tried. I do the same and the only risk come from SSH vulnerabilities. Since nobody would burn a 0-day for SSH (priceless) on my server, unattended upgrades solve this problem too for the most part.