In the past two weeks I set up a new VPS, and I run a small experiment. I share the results for those who are curious.
Consider that this is a backup server only, meaning that there is no outgoing traffic unless a backup is actually to be recovered, or as we will see, because of sshd.
I initially left the standard "port 22 open to the world" for 4-5 days, I then moved sshd to a different port (still open to the whole world), and finally I closed everything and turned on tailscale. You find a visualization of the resulting egress traffic in the image. Different colors are different areas of the world. Ignore the orange spikes which were my own ssh connections to set up stuff.
Main points:
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there were about 10 Mb of egress per day due just to sshd answering to scanners. Not to mention the cluttering of access logs.
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moving to a non standard port is reasonably sufficient to avoid traffic and log cluttering even without IP restrictions
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Tailscale causes a bit of traffic, negligible of course, but continuous.
Public key auth, and fail2ban on an extremely strict mode with scaling bantime works well enough for me to leave 22 open.
Fail2ban will ban people for even checking if the port is open.
If Fail2Ban is so important, why the h*** does it not come installed and enabled as standard?!
Security is the number-1 priority for any OS, and yet stock SSHD apparently does not have Fail2Ban-level security built in. My conclusion is that Fail2Ban cannot therefore be that vital.
Honest question, is there a good default config available somewhere or is what
apt install fail2bandoes good to go? All the tutorials I’ve found have left it to the reader to configure their own rules.