{"id":287600,"date":"2026-07-09T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/09\/bots-found-my-home-server-in-minutes-but-3-settings-shut-them-out\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T11:25:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T15:25:07","slug":"bots-found-my-home-server-in-minutes-but-3-settings-shut-them-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/09\/bots-found-my-home-server-in-minutes-but-3-settings-shut-them-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Bots found my home server in minutes, but 3 settings shut them out"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bots found my home server in minutes, but 3 settings shut them out<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.makeuseof.com\/bots-found-my-home-server-in-minutes-but-3-settings-shut-them-out\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-07-09 11:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.makeuseof.com<\/a><\/p>\n

I needed a cleaner way to SSH into homelab servers without exposing any internal services. A small Linux SSH jump server was the answer. It could just sit on the edge of the network and give me one controlled entry point with everything else tucked away behind a network firewall.<\/p>\n

The only problem is I hate deploying public-facing servers with vulnerable ports because it\u2019s like painting a big target sign on my home IP address.<\/p>\n

Within half an hour of putting the server online, the logs were already full of login attempts from random IP addresses. Not one or two curious knocks, either. Hundreds of attempts had hit a server that didn\u2019t even exist an hour ago.<\/p>\n

So, I made three fairly simple changes that significantly stopped the noise and turned a password-friendly SSH target into something more secure.<\/p>\n

\n The bots found my jump box before I finished building it
\n <\/h2>\n

\n Port 22 had made my server an irresistible target for bots
\n <\/h3>\n

This new server only had one job. It just needed to act as a controlled SSH entry point into my home-ops setup, not become another public-facing attack vector for bots. There weren\u2019t any dashboards, web servers, or file shares waiting behind a login screen. It was just a boring old SSH box on my edge network.<\/p>\n

Before locking it down, I wanted to check what was actually listening. This command showed me the most recent SSH noise:<\/p>\n

sudo ss -tulpn<\/p>\n

That showed what I expected. That SSH was listening on port 22, and that\u2019s it. At this point, the server had only been up for about one hour, so I wanted to see any recent failed attempts at port scanning and SSH authentication:<\/p>\n

sudo journalctl -u ssh –since “1 hour…
\n
Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bots found my home server in minutes, but 3 settings shut them out https:\/\/www.makeuseof.com\/bots-found-my-home-server-in-minutes-but-3-settings-shut-them-out\/ Publish…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":287601,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static0.makeuseofimages.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/wm\/2026\/07\/ssh-logs-showing-bot-scanning-of-fresh-ubuntu-server.png?w=1600&h=900&fit=crop","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[71],"class_list":["post-287600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-linux","tag-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287600"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287600"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":287602,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287600\/revisions\/287602"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}