No pain no gain

When you are running your SSH server on the standard port 22, you likely see brute force login attempts multiple times a day. The SSH server does not limit unsuccessfull login attempts by itself. So there are multiple ways to deal with this problem.

One option is to move the SSH daemon to a non-standard port. But this means that you might get problems connecting yourself to the server if you are working from a restricted network. So another solution would be to use certificates for login. But then you need to make sure that you carry the certificates with you when you want to login to your server.

Now a good solution is to limit access to the SSH server. One way would be to use the so called port-knocking approach. Here the access to the SSH port is blocked until you use some kind of secret knock-sequence. Then the port will be unblocked for your IP for a certain time. This is very effective but has the downside that you always need to use this knock mechanism before connecting to your server.

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