this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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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:

  • there were about 10 Mb of egress per day due just to sshd answering to scanners. Not to mention the cluttering of access logs.

  • moving to a non standard port is reasonably sufficient to avoid traffic and log cluttering even without IP restrictions

  • Tailscale causes a bit of traffic, negligible of course, but continuous.

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[–] MoshpitDaddy 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] aesir 4 points 1 year ago

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

[–] SheeEttin 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Throw CrowdSec on there to stop the bots before they can do anything

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Prevent password auth and setup sshguard. Wireguard is very nice in that it doesn't support password auth.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is public key authentication not good enough? Tailscale is cool but can be tedious if you also use other VPNs

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah that's what I have too. One of my servers is exposed with key auth and I just tunnel to other servers from there. A few MB egress is nothing compared with the amount of spam my webserver needs to deal with

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