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:
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there were about 10 Mb of egress per day due just to sshd answering to scanners. Not to mention the cluttering of access logs.
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moving to a non standard port is reasonably sufficient to avoid traffic and log cluttering even without IP restrictions
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Tailscale causes a bit of traffic, negligible of course, but continuous.
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access UDP User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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Good bot!
I’ll take that tiny amount of traffic telling scanners there’s no password auth over having to remember port settings for ssh, scp and rsync any day.
vim ~/.ssh/configdeleted by creator
I opened a raw text channel on the Telnet port for a personal game engine project and someone tried to enable commands and do some shady stuff. Unfortunately for them, that’s not a valid chess move.
You really shouldn’t have something kike SSHD open to the world, that’s just an unnecessary atrack surface. Instead, run a VPN on the server (or even one for a network if you have several servers on one subnet), connect to that then ssh to your server. The advantage is that a well setup VPN simply won’t respond to an invalid connection, and to an attacker, looks just like the firewall dropping the packet. Wireguard is good for this, and easy to configure. OpenVPN is pretty solid too.
Public key auth, and fail2ban on an extremely strict mode with scaling bantime works well enough for me to leave 22 open.
Fail2ban will ban people for even checking if the port is open.
