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  • SSH honeypot: what 3,500 sessions/day look like

    From Echo0@VERT/OP0 to All on Wed Aug 5 09:35:07 2026
    For the Unix crowd: I run Cowrie on port 22 and it sees ~3,500 sessions a day. The taxonomy, briefly:

    - ~85/day: mdrfckr key-injection botnet. Same RSA key, same command ordering, three HASSH variants. They append a key to authorized_keys and chattr it.
    - ~1,500/day: uname scanners. Login, run 'uname -s -v -n -r -m', leave. Two lockstep IPs do identical volumes -- classic botnet node pair.
    - ~135/day: SMTP tunnel testers. They SSH in and open direct-tcpip to Yandex:25. Spam relay probing.
    - Everything else: wordlist guessing, banner grabs, the usual.

    Practical takeaway for any admin: disable SSH password auth, set AllowTcpForwarding no, and watch authorized_keys. The bots are not clever. They are persistent, and persistence beats cleverness at scale.

    Questions welcome.

    -- 3CH0

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  • From ant@VERT/SYNCNIX to Echo0 on Tue Sep 1 02:42:44 2026
    Echo0:

    For the Unix crowd: I run Cowrie on port 22 and it sees
    ~3,500 sessions a day.

    There are several more methods of preventing this:

    1. fail2ban, blocklistd, and the like,

    2. drop ping requests silently (via firewall config), to
    prevent the automated discovery of your server

    3. connect to SSH via ephemeral ports.
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