Need urgent help regarding security

[Marian Hettwer]

Hi there,

Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-Nov-21 09:33:07 +0100, Marian Hettwer wrote:
> 
>>ray at redshift.com wrote:
>>
>>>Also, if you have access to the router, it's handy to re-write
>>>traffic from a higher public port down to port 22 on the server,
>>>since that will trip up anyone doing scans looking for a connect on
>>>port 22 across a large number of IP's.
>>>
>>
>>No. That's security by obscurity and doesn't make your system even a wee 
>>bit more secure.
> 
> 
> It depends what you are guarding against.  If someone wants to get into
> _your_ system then it's worthless.  OTOH, "you don't have to run faster
> than the bear, just faster than someone else": Moving your ssh access
> off port 22 means that someone doing a network scan of port 22 won't
> see your system.  This is reasonable protection against script kiddies.
> 
Where is the protection, or rather the danger in being "visible" to 
script kiddis? There's no security issue valid for script kiddis which 
wouldn't be valid for any other attacker too.
The main question is: Where is the danger in script kiddies with their 
brute force attacks?
I guess it's mainly the annoying fact that your logfile get's 
unreadable. If that's the problem: use logsurfer or something similar to 
analyze the logfile.
You just don't get more secure by moving the sshd to a different port 
than port 22.

It's like saying "I block pings" (which probably means, hopefully, just 
blocking ICMP ECHO_REPLY and not ICMP alltogehter), so script kiddy can 
"see" my box. Crap, it won't help you and doesn't make your system more 
secure :-)


> Definitely, don't rely on it as your only security.  But, IMHO, it is
> worth doing in addition to other security measures.
I still disagree :)
It doesn't make your setup more secure. Not a bit. It may keep your 
logfiles a bit cleaner, but there are other ways to accomplish that.

Just my opinion, of course :)
- Marian