533

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.

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] SheeEttin@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

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.

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] MoshpitDaddy@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

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@lemmy.world 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

[-] PhilBro@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago

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

[-] solberg 4 points 1 year ago

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

[-] bjornp_@lemm.ee 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

[-] ptman@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

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

[-] Entheon@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

What software did you use you monitor this? I am newish to self hosting and would like to secure my connection better.

[-] aesir@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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"

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
533 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

39665 readers
154 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS