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What's the real danger of opening ports?
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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Get a WAF. Sophos firewall is free if you want to diy. If not, use cloudflare.
Opening ports, logging, monitoring, nailing up allow listed IP addresses and dicking around with fail2ban is such a timesuck. None of that crap will stop something from exploiting a vulnerability.
Some things are worth farming out to a 3rd party. Plus, you can just point your DNS entry over and be mostly done. No more dynamic IP bs.
A WAF won't magically solve your problems and free you from your attack surface. To be effective it needs contect of the application and a lot of tuning. Your public facing services should be treated, configured and maintained as such. I am not sure if you include a WAF in the stuff that won't stop exploitation of vulns, but it definitely belongs there. Yes, it can decrease volume and make exploitation a bit harder but that's it usually. Also don't just include proprietary third party stuff and hope it solves your problems.
It isn't a magic solution, no, but you have a lot more control than crummy layer 3 firewall rules and endless lists.
The big players have far more data about what bad looks like. Either we can play whack a mole with outdated tools and techniques or get smart and learn to use what is available.
Self hosting doesn't mean we go backward in terms of the sophistication and difficulty, it means embracing modern solutions.
In the dinosaur days, we had primitive tools, but so did the attackers. We cannot hope to self host with any measure of security if we bring piss to a shitfight.
I tested WAFs in the past, also ones from the big players and while they might block some cheesy stuff on the application layer, as long as they are not heavily tailored towards your application, they stop bein effective against most manual stuff.
Everything lower than application layer ist not a WAF btw, so I am not sure if you mean WAF or some Firewallish stuff.
Just stick to best practices and expose only what you really need to expose. When putting third parties in front of your stuff this als has data protection implications. If using it makes you feel better okay but it should not feel you more secure if you expose vulnerable stuff.