Hi, recently (ironically, right after sharing some of my posts here on Lemmy) I had a higher (than usual, not high in general) number of “attacks” to my website (I am talking about dumb bots, vulnerability scanners and similar stuff). While all of these are not really critical for my site (which is static and minimal), I decided to take some time and implement some generic measures using (mostly) Crowdsec (fail2ban alternative?) and I made a post about that to help someone who might be in a similar situation.

The whole thing is basic, in the sense that is just a way to reduce noise and filter out the simplest attacks, which is what I argue most of people hosting websites should be mostly concerned with.

  • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nlEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    There is one neat trick: don’t expose SSH.

    There is still not a reason anyone has been able to give for 99% of self-hosters to expose SSH.

    If you need to access your machine via ssh while on the go. Wireguard to your local network, use SSH. Done. Unless you are running an always-up public facing site, the amount of times you have to access your machine that can’t wait until after work is very low anyway.

    Bots will scan all ports. That is just how it works. Less than 22, but you will still get spammed. Why force your computer to go through the fail2ban loop and take up resources when it is simply not needed at all and you can block it on another machine?

    • 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      This blog is specifically for websites that are public facing. Sure, you can wireguard into your local network, but you can also SSH into your local network. Either way you have to poke a hole.

    • loudwhisper@infosec.pubOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Comfort is the main reason, I suppose. If I mess up Wireguard config, even to debug the tunnel I need to go to the KVM console. It also means that if I go to a different place and I have to SSH into the box I can’t plug my Yubikey and SSH from there. It’s a rare occurrence, but still…

      Ultimately I do understand both point of view. The thing is, SSH bots pose no threats after the bare minimum hardening for SSH has been done. The resource consumption is negligible, so it has no real impact.

      To me the tradeoff is slight inconvenience vs slightly bigger attack surface (in case of CVEs). Ultimately everyone can decide which compromise is acceptable for them, but I would say that the choice is not really a big one.