Live data from Hacker News

DigitalOcean block storage is down

status.digitalocean.com

61–70 of 88 posts

Re: DigitalOcean block storage is down

#61

This is OT, but I have a droplet on DO and I'm amazed at the amount of malicious traffic it gets. Is it normal for a very private vps to receive thousands of ssh attempts per hour? I have fail2ban installed and the jail is so busy it's quite astounding. Anyone with more web hosting experience that can weigh in?

> Is it normal for a very private vps to receive thousands of ssh attempts per hour?

Yes. The thing is about the IPv4 space is that it’s really not that big (3,706,452,992 public addresses) so it’s pretty trivial to poke every single one esp if you fine tune your port list.

The most common advice is to hide your private services. Instead of using port 22 for ssh use 23231 instead. It’s a little more annoying but you can also use port knocking. So to open port 22 (or what ever port you like) first you got to poke port 23123 then 7654 then port 39212 within a short period of time then the port knocking software will open up port 22. (Or a combo of both change default port and port knocking)

It won’t stop people “ringing the door bell” to see if anyone is home, but it will help with the then trying to brute force pass the login prompt.

Re: DigitalOcean block storage is down

#62

This is OT, but I have a droplet on DO and I'm amazed at the amount of malicious traffic it gets. Is it normal for a very private vps to receive thousands of ssh attempts per hour? I have fail2ban installed and the jail is so busy it's quite astounding. Anyone with more web hosting experience that can weigh in?

[deleted]

Re: DigitalOcean block storage is down

#63

This is OT, but I have a droplet on DO and I'm amazed at the amount of malicious traffic it gets. Is it normal for a very private vps to receive thousands of ssh attempts per hour? I have fail2ban installed and the jail is so busy it's quite astounding. Anyone with more web hosting experience that can weigh in?

Yup this is normal, when I can't change the SSH port (e.g for compatibility) then I switch f2b to permanently ban, which should reduce any incurred load by black-holing instead of attempting authentication as the list grows more comprehensive over time (this wont affect other services e.g apache, in-case a user is unwittingly part of a botnet).

Re: DigitalOcean block storage is down

#64

This is OT, but I have a droplet on DO and I'm amazed at the amount of malicious traffic it gets. Is it normal for a very private vps to receive thousands of ssh attempts per hour? I have fail2ban installed and the jail is so busy it's quite astounding. Anyone with more web hosting experience that can weigh in?

I work for a web hosting company in Texas, and this is ridiculously common. Any public IP with any public service at all will be poked, prodded, and generally made uncomfortable by every bot and crawler you can think of, trying common password combinations and scanning for common vulnerabilities in popular software. This catches so many of our customers by surprise, who tend to mistakenly believe they're being target…

I always switch my outward-facing ssh servers to key-only. Is there any advantage for running fail2ban additionally?

Re: DigitalOcean block storage is down

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a web hosting company in Texas, and this is ridiculously common. Any public IP with any public service at all will be poked, prodded, and generally made uncomfortable by every bot and crawler you can think of, trying common password combinations and scanning for common vulnerabilities in popular software. This catches so many of our customers by surprise, who tend to mistakenly believe they're being target…

I always switch my outward-facing ssh servers to key-only. Is there any advantage for running fail2ban additionally?

Presumably then iptables handles the reject/drop rather than SSH sessions being created that fail at login? (Disclaimer, I don't know exactly how any sshd handles dropping clients who attempt to connect by password when you have set it to cert only; but it seems like dropping at the firewall would be more optimal).

Re: DigitalOcean block storage is down

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a web hosting company in Texas, and this is ridiculously common. Any public IP with any public service at all will be poked, prodded, and generally made uncomfortable by every bot and crawler you can think of, trying common password combinations and scanning for common vulnerabilities in popular software. This catches so many of our customers by surprise, who tend to mistakenly believe they're being target…

I always switch my outward-facing ssh servers to key-only. Is there any advantage for running fail2ban additionally?

It makes your logs easier to read because they aren't full of ssh failures.

Re: DigitalOcean block storage is down

#67
post #63

This is OT, but I have a droplet on DO and I'm amazed at the amount of malicious traffic it gets. Is it normal for a very private vps to receive thousands of ssh attempts per hour? I have fail2ban installed and the jail is so busy it's quite astounding. Anyone with more web hosting experience that can weigh in?

Yup this is normal, when I can't change the SSH port (e.g for compatibility) then I switch f2b to permanently ban, which should reduce any incurred load by black-holing instead of attempting authentication as the list grows more comprehensive over time (this wont affect other services e.g apache, in-case a user is unwittingly part of a botnet).

Fatfingered typist beware...

Re: DigitalOcean block storage is down

#68

This is OT, but I have a droplet on DO and I'm amazed at the amount of malicious traffic it gets. Is it normal for a very private vps to receive thousands of ssh attempts per hour? I have fail2ban installed and the jail is so busy it's quite astounding. Anyone with more web hosting experience that can weigh in?

I work for a hosting company and this is totally normal. Digital Ocean and other VPS providers IP ranges are specifically targeted as many amateurs running servers there.

If you've disabled password logins then just don't worry about it. fail2ban is overkill you can rate limit with firewalld or iptables withou needing extra tools.

Re: DigitalOcean block storage is down

#70
post #67
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup this is normal, when I can't change the SSH port (e.g for compatibility) then I switch f2b to permanently ban, which should reduce any incurred load by black-holing instead of attempting authentication as the list grows more comprehensive over time (this wont affect other services e.g apache, in-case a user is unwittingly part of a botnet).

Fatfingered typist beware...

hah, i also tend to up the attempts... If you have more than one server you can always tunnel through one of the others if you lock yourself out. Worst case of course VPS console.
Post reply on HN