I have to second this suggestion - changing the port did wonders for our servers. Of course, as Dan says, it works for script kiddies, not so much against a determined attack on your server.

--Bruce


On 06/12/2017 09:59 AM, Dan Garthwaite wrote:
If you can change the port number it does wonders against the script kiddies.

Just remember to add the new port, restart sshd, then remove the old port. :)

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 1:53 PM, Ted Roche <tedro...@gmail.com <mailto:tedro...@gmail.com>> wrote:

    Thanks, all for the recommendations. I hadn't seen sshguard before;
    I'll give that a try.

    I do have Fail2Ban in place, and have customized a number of scripts,
    mostly for Apache (trying to invoke asp scripts on my LAMP server
    results in instaban, for example) and it is what it reporting the ssh
    login failures.

    I have always seen them, in the 10 years I've had this server running,
    but the frequency, periodicity and international variety (usually
    they're all China, Russian, Romania) seemed like there might be
    something else going on.

    Be careful out there.

    On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 11:19 AM, Mark Komarinski
    <mkomarin...@wayga.org <mailto:mkomarin...@wayga.org>> wrote:
    > sshguard is really good since it'll drop in a iptables rule to
    block an IP
    > address after a number of attemps (and prevent knocking on other
    ports too).
    >
    > Yubikey as 2FA is pretty nice too.
    >
    > -------- Original message --------
    > From: Bruce Dawson <j...@codemeta.com <mailto:j...@codemeta.com>>
    > Date: 6/11/17 10:58 AM (GMT-05:00)
    > To: gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org
    <mailto:gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org>
    > Subject: Re: What's the strategy for bad guys guessing a few ssh
    passwords?
    >
    > sshguard takes care of most of them (especially the high
    bandwidth ones).
    >
    > The black hats don't care - they're looking for vulnerable
    systems. If
    > they find one, they'll exploit it (or not).
    >
    > Note that a while ago (more than a few years), comcast used to probe
    > systems to see if they're vulnerable. Either they don't do that any
    > more, or contract it out because I haven't see probes from any
    of their
    > systems in years. This probably holds true for other ISPs, and
    various
    > intelligence agencies in the world - both private and public, not to
    > mention various disreputable enterprises.
    >
    > --Bruce
    >
    >
    > On 06/11/2017 10:17 AM, Ted Roche wrote:
    >> For 36 hours now, one of my clients' servers has been logging ssh
    >> login attempts from around the world, low volume, persistent,
    but more
    >> frequent than usual. sshd is listening on a non-standard port,
    just to
    >> minimize the garbage in the logs.
    >>
    >> A couple of attempts is normal; we've seen that for years. But
    this is
    >> several each  hour, and each hour an IP from a different country:
    >> Belgium, Korea, Switzerland, Bangladesh, France, China, Germany,
    >> Dallas, Greece. Usernames vary: root, mythtv, rheal, etc.
    >>
    >> There's several levels of defense in use: firewalls, intrusion
    >> detection, log monitoring, etc, so each script gets a few
    guesses and
    >> the IP is then rejected.
    >>
    >> In theory, the defenses should be sufficient, but I have a concern
    >> that I'm missing their strategy here. It's not a DDOS, they are
    very
    >> low volume. It will take them several millennia to guess enough
    >> dictionary attack guesses to get through, so what's the point?
    >>
    >
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    --
    Ted Roche
    Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
    http://www.tedroche.com
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