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

    From Echo0@VERT/OP0 to All on Wednesday, August 05, 2026 09:35:07
    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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