It's log filtering.

Log filtering has about as much impact on security as having overseas contractors watch your security cameras.

Log filtering at the expense of having one more thing to manage, forget, or otherwise screw-up.

Ways I've seen this go wrong:

- someone fails to copy the port while communicating it

- the new whiz-bang AI security solution detects non-standard SSH ports and "quarantines" you while you try to figure out what happened and who to talk to

- someone manually "reviews" the firewall rules and locks you out of your own boxes

- someone builds a tool that uses SSH but doesn't allow non-standard ports

> the new whiz-bang AI security solution

> someone manually "reviews" the firewall rules

This is a feature. Allowing Unfriendly AIs or incompetent morons to dictate security policy will go horribly wrong eventually; nonstandard SSH ports help make it painful for you to allow them to gain a foothold in the first place.

Turning incompetence into actual problems is not a value-add. I already know the incompetence exists, so there's no informational value, and if I were in a position to do something about it, I would have, so there's no organizational value. Just wasted time.

It's not even that.

I have certain hosts behind a single IP and forward SSH to them on arbitrarily chosen ports.

Do I still get random logins on those ports?

Why yes I do.

Does putting SSH on a different port make any difference?

No it doesn't.

Putting SSH on a different port is either done for a specific reason, or you're just deluding yourself that you've somehow reduced your attack surface.

It clearly makes a difference for me. My servers which have SSH listening on port 22 have countless failed login attempts. Those running it on another random port have almost none.

Then you're clearly a statistical outlier :)

Me and @p4bl0. I've got one box with ssh on 22. Logs are very noisy and the rules from fail2ban grow and grow.

On the other 20+ boxen with ssh on port xxx22 the logs and f2b rules are much smaller - which means less hassle for the admin.

And on the boxen with services behind WG there is zero noise.

Naturally we're using keys only with all this. The reduced noise in the logs/rules/firewall are very handy.

I love Brian Regan but I have to say, even though I'm probably ruining one of his best jokes [0], that the plural form of "box" is not "boxen".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkrMsPiqG6M&feature=youtu.be...

Oh, I'm aware it's "boxes". But, I got into the "boxen" habit in the middle 90s and now that I'm "old" I've chosen to become stubborn and stuck in my ways. Also, I think it's more fun. I've got other things to be pedantic about.

I'm pretty sure "Unix boxen" predates Brian Regan's standup.

OpenSSH on port 22 gets at least one attempt a minute for me (and that's with fail2ban blocking IPs on a single failure.) Dropbear on port 2222 gets at most one an hour.

Since I cleaned out and restarted fail2ban yesterday (~1800BST), the sshd:22 filter has banned 291 IPs whilst the dropbear:2222 filter has banned 8.

No, that's the norm.

> Putting SSH on a different port is either done for a specific reason, or [...]

Yes. The specific reason is "it makes log files less full of crap we have to sift through".