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.
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
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
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:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
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.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
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