I mean, it’s not a big deal to have crawlers and bots poking at our webserver if all you do is serving static pages (which is common for a blog).
Now if you run code on server side (eg using PHP or python), you’ll want to retrieve multiple known lists of bad actors to block them by default, and setup fail2ban to block those that went through. The most important thing however is to keep your server up to date at all times.
I use fail2ban and add detection (for example I noticed that after I implemented it for ssh, they started using SMTP for brute force, so had to add that one as well.
I also have another rule that observes fail2ban log and adds repeated offenders to a long term black list.
I use ACL where I add my home/work IPs as well as a few commonly used VPNs IPs as well. Cloudflare clocks known bots for me. Don’t see anything in the server logs, but I do see attempts on the CF side.
I am actually thinking about going back to Cloudflare tunnels. The only reason that I am hesitant is that I do use a fair amount of bandwidth as I host a mastodon server as well as a lemmy one. I don’t want to be stuck with a huge bandwidth bill.
I stopped messing with port forwarding and reverse proxies and fail2ban and all the other stuff a long time ago.
Everything is accessible for login only locally, and then I add Tailscale (alternative would be ZeroTier) on top of it. Boom, done. Everything is seamless, I don’t have any random connection attempts clogging up my logging, and I’ve massively reduced my risk surface. Sure I’m not immune; if the app communicates on the internet, it must be regularly patched, and that I do my best to keep up with.
I use Caddy as a reverse proxy, but most of this should carry over to nginx. I used to use basic_auth at the proxy level, which worked fine(-ish) though it broke Kavita (because websockets don’t work with basic auth, go figure). I’ve since migrated to putting everything behind forward_auth/Authelia which is even more secure in some ways (2FA!) and even more painless, especially on my phone/tablet.
Sadly reverse proxy authentication doesn’t work with most apps (though it works with PWAs, even if they’re awkward about it sometimes), so I have an exception that allows Jellyfin through if it’s on a VPN/local network (I don’t have it installed on my phone anyway):
It’s nice being able to access everything from everywhere without needing to deal with VPNs on Android^ and not having to worry too much about security patching everything timely (just have to worry about Caddy + Authelia basically). Single sign on for those apps that support it is also a really nice touch.
^You can’t run multiple VPN tunnels at once without jailbreaking/rooting Android
I only expose services on IPv6, for now that seems to work pretty well - very few scanners (I encounter only 1 or 2 per week, and they seem to connect to port 80/443 only).
I still have firewall (that blocks almost all incoming connections) and sshguard setup. I also check the firewall logs daily, blocking IPs that I find to be suspicious.
I could probably do better, but with so few scanners connecting to my home server, I have managed to sleep way better than back when I setup a server on IPv4!
Also, even if my home server gets attacked, at least I know that my other devices aren’t sharing the same IP with them… NAT-less is a godsend.
Lol, I have heard some ISP horror stories from the Down Under.
I am fortunate enough that my country’s government has been forcing ISPs to implement IPv6 in their backbone infrastructure, so nowadays all I have to really do is to flick a switch on the router (unfortunately many routers still turn off IPv6 by default) to get an IPv6 connection.
Yeah the internet services here are really stuck in the past. Hard to tell if theyre taking advantage of the scarcity of ipv4 addresses to make more money somehow, or of theyre just too fuckn lazy
I’ve been using crowdsec with swag for quite some time. I set it up with a discord notifier. It’s very interesting to see the types of exploits that are probed and from each country. Crowdsec blocks just like fail2ban and seems to do so in a more elegant fashion.
Nothing too fancy other than following the recommended security practices. And to be aware of and regularly monitor the potential security holes of the servers/services I have open.
Even though semi-related, and commonly frowned upon by admins, I have unattended upgrades on my servers and my most of my services are auto-updated. If an update breaks a service, I guess its an opportunity to earn some more stripes.
All the legit reasons mentioned in the blog post seem to apply to badly behaved client software. Using a good and stable server OS avoids most of the negatives.
Unattended Upgrades on Debian for example will by default only apply security updates. I see no reason why this would harm stability more than running a potentially unpatched system.
Even though minimal, the risk of security patches introducing new changes to your software is still there as we all have different ideas on how/what correct software updates should look like.
A pentester here. Those bad looking requests are mostly random fuzzing by bots and sometimes from benign vulnerability scanners like Censys. If you keep your applications up date and credentials strong, there shouldn’t be much to worry about. Of course, you should review the risks and possible vulns of every web application and other services well before putting them up in the public. Search for general server hardening tips online if you’re unsure about your configuration hygiene.
An another question is, do you need to expose your services to the public? If they are purely private or for a small group of people, I’d recommend putting them behind a VPN. Wireguard is probably the easiest one to set up and so transparent you wouldn’t likely even notice it’s there while using it.
But if you really want to get rid of just those annoying requests, there’s really good tips already posted here.
Anything exposed to the internet will get probed by malicious traffic looking for vulnerabilities. Best thing you can do is to lock down your server.
Here’s what I usually do:
Install and configure fail2ban
Configure SSH to only allow SSH keys
Configure a firewall to only allow access to public services, if a service only needs to be accessible by you then whitelist your own IP. Alternatively install a VPN
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