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A comment on Amazon's customer service backdoor. Parent comment

Re:Amazon's customer service backdoor by andrewaylett on Monday January 25, 2016 @03:43AM (#10966204)
Not really -- security by obscurity is a re-statement of the idea that the security mechanism shouldn't need to be secret for the security to have meaning. You're allowed to have secret data, just not secret mechanism.

And relying on what looks like secret data (changing the SSH port) where the number of bits of entropy is low enough that it's plausible to try them all (16) probably still counts as security by obscurity -- it might hide you from many attackers, but it's not enough to make you secure.

Relying on data that's not actually secret, just hard to find, is just insecure.

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Re:Amazon's customer service backdoor by noja on Monday January 25, 2016 @04:15AM (#10966278)
> but it's not enough to make you secure.

That's not why you change the ssh port at all.

You change the ssh port to filter out false positives, if someone is attacking you on your weirdo ssh port, it's likely an actual attack that you need to pay attention to. You still need to do the rest of the security stuff.

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