Moving your SSH port isn’t security by obscurity
I really hate the accusation that changing services to uncommon ports is security through obscurity. It&#x27;s not a <i>security</i> practice, it&#x27;s a high pass filter.<p>There&#x27;s billions of hosts on the Internet and many millions of them running an SSH service. Even attackers with huge botnets at their disposal have finite resources and time to probe for hosts and then try exploiting vulnerable ones. Every exploit attempt has some percentage chance of being against a honeypot used to help catch the attacker.<p>There&#x27;s little point in even sniffing non-standard&#x2F;uncommon ports for different services. Anyone changing a service port has a higher likelihood of having a more secure system than someone with standard ports. So even if you scan high number ports for an SSH service you&#x27;re unlikely to find one on a high port that&#x27;s not using a more secure than default configuration.<p>So when you have SSH listening on some uncommon port and see hits in your logs you have a reasonable assurance the attacker isn&#x27;t some script kiddy spamming the &quot;attack&quot; button on some stupid app. You also have reasonable assurance blocking that host&#x2F;network with fail2ban or equivalent will actually be effective. You can also set way more strict fail2ban rules since you&#x27;re far less likely to ever lock out authorized traffic. The more specific your allow criteria the better and more effective your block rules can be.<p>A &quot;Beware of Dog&quot; sign doesn&#x27;t physically secure your house on its own. You might not even have a dog. What it does in change the calculus for a burglar. Why risk it when there&#x27;s more obviously less risky targets nearby? The sign is a high pass filter.