You did link a vulnerability! That is true. I didn’t claim SSH had a clean track record, I claimed it had a better track record than most other software. That vulnerability is hard to exploit, and generates a lot of noise if you were to try, which nobody has because it’s never been found in the wild.

People who sit on 0-days for critical software like SSH don’t go out and try to mass-exploit it because it will be found within the day and patched within the week once they start making noise. This is not a quiet exploit. If they’re smart, they sell it. If they’re ambitious, they build an elaborate multi-chain attack against a specific target. Only 0.14% of devices vulnerable to this exploit are EoL versions of OpenSSH, so once this was patched, it was no longer a useful attack vector.

It would also have been completely negated by fail2ban, which is prominently deployed on internet facing SSH, as it required thousands and thousands of connection attempts to trigger the condition. It could also have been mitigated by not running sshd as root, though I understand that most people don’t want to deal with that headache even though it is possible.

There are thousands of independent honeypots that sit quietly and sniff all the mass-attacks and they earn their daily bread by aggregating and reporting this data. If you run a mass exploit, you will be found within the day. Trust me, I burned an IP address by regularly scanning the whole IPv4 space. You are going to end up on blacklists real fuckin’ fast and whatever you were doing will be noticed and reported.

If you’re going to open something, SSH is a very safe choice. But yes, don’t open it if you don’t need it. We are discussing how to open a service to the internet safely, though, so we need it.

Well, having a domain is basically documenting your IP publicly. It’s not that risky.

A honeypot is something that is intentionally left available, to alert you when it gets hit. In practice, they’re just a tool to tell security specialists when they need to start worrying; They wouldn’t be used by the average user at all.

The goal is to build your security like layers, and ideally have all of your services behind the secure walls. Between these layers, you have honeypots. If someone gets through your first layer of security but hits the honeypot, you know someone is sniffing around, or maybe has an exploit for your outer layer that you need to research. If they get through the second layer and hit your second honeypot, you know that someone is specifically targeting you (instead of simply running automated scans) and you need to pay closer attention. Etc…

Reinforcing the attack layer comes in two main forms, which work in tandem: Strengthening the actual layer, and reducing attack vectors. The first is focused on using strong passwords, keeping systems up to date, running something like Fail2Ban for services that are exposed, etc… The goal is for each layer of security to be robust, to reduce the chances of a bot attack actually working. Bots will simply sniff around and automatically throw shit at the wall to see if anything sticks.

The second part is focused on identifying and mitigating attack vectors. Essentially reducing the amount of holes in the wall. It doesn’t matter how strong the wall is if it’s full of holes for your server’s various services. The goal is typically to have each layer be as solid as possible, and grant access to the layers below it. So for instance, running a VPN. The VPN gets you access to the network, without exposing services externally. In order to access your services, they need to get through the VPN first, making the VPN the primary attack vector. So you can focus on ensuring that the VPN is secure, instead of trying to spread your focus amongst a dozen different services. If it’s exposed to the open internet, it is a new potential attack vector; The strength of the wall doesn’t actually matter, if one of those services has an exploit that someone can use to get inside your network.

Home users really only need to worry about things like compromised services, but corporate security specialists also focus on things like someone talking their way past the receptionist and into the server room, USB sticks getting “lost” around the building and plugged into random machines by curious employees, etc… All of these are attack vectors, even if they’re not digital. If you have three or four layers of security in a corporate setting and your third or fourth honeypot gets hit, you potentially have some corporate spy wrist-deep in your server room.

For an easy example, imagine having a default password on a service, and then exposing it to the internet via port forwarding. It doesn’t matter how strong your firewall is anymore. The bot will simply sniff the service’s port, try the default credentials, and now it has control of that service.

The better way to do it would be to reduce your attack vectors at each layer; Require the VPN to access the network via a secure connection, then have a strong password on the service so it can’t easily be compromised.

Yes they are. The idea that they’re not would be a statistical wonder.

Guess I’m a wonder then. I’ve always thought of myself as pretty wonderful, I’m glad to hear you agree.

Are you logging into your Authelia login page 2k times a day? If not, I suspect that some (most) of those are malicious lol.

That’s 2k requests made. None of them were served. Try to keep up.

Well I am an expert with over a decade of experience in cybersecurity, but I’m not acting like an expert here, I’m acting like somebody with at least a rudimentary understanding of how these things work.

Then I guess I should get a career in cybersecurity, because I obviously know more than someone with over a decade of supposed experience. If you were worth whatever your company is paying you in wages, you would know that a rule blocking connections from other countries, and also requiring the request for the login page come from one of the services on your domain, will block virtually all malicious attempts to access your services. Such a rule doesn’t work for a public site, but for a selfhosted setup it’s absolutely an easy option to reduce your bandwidth usage and make your setup far more secure.