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Comment by ferguess_k | Hacker News Reader

I heard that once you put up a website on the public internet, it would immediately gets attacked by all kinds of scanners or other worse things. Not sure if it's true as I'm not a web guy.

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All IPv4 addresses, domains (maybe more so for recently-registered ones), and subdomains from Certificate Transparency Logs (for HTTPS certs) are all constantly checked and poked.

Back in the day, I made the mistake of hooking up a fresh Windows XP (at least I think it was; pre-SP2) install directly to the internet. There was no firewall or NAT to protect me. The machine got pwned almost immediately.

It's still true!

> What happens if you connect Windows XP to the Internet in 2024?

https://youtu.be/6uSVVCmOH5w

Every public IPv4 address is port scanned multiple times a day.

Which really isn't a problem, unless you're being scanned so much your bandwidth is being overwhelmed. Certainly not the case for me, despite having port 80 and 443 open

I have a server that has a slow (5s) response to unknown pages, returns it as 200, and makes the next failing request even slower (for unauthenticated users). That seems to keep the number of requests limited. Perhaps I should just drop the connection after a certain number of requests.

BTW, quite a few of these port scanners are companies that offer to scan your ports for vulnerabilities. Temu pen testing, so to speak.

Do you configure this in your firewall? How can I replicate this?

what firewall do you use?

It's in the "404" handler of the backend. It should be possible to write a caddy or nginx module for it.

Watching my website's firewall and ssh logs show all the various hacking attempts is calming in the same way that watching waves crash on to the shore is.

More like looking a thin net preventing mosquitoes from biting your skin, as there is some intention behind it, not just physics.

Per day? per minute or second.

Damn that's like Blood War in DND...

IIRC Carnegie Mellon did a study years ago which showed that you could not unbox a new Windows machine, connect it "directly" to the Internet, and get it fully patched before it was pwned.

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