December 16, 2025
Never gonna scan you up
Confuse some SSH bots and make botters block you
Admins prank the robots, skeptics say “just lock the door” while everyone argues about a surprise Rickroll
TLDR: A new how‑to suggests pranking noisy login bots by tweaking server greetings so sloppy scanners stall and give up, while critics say the real fix is to hide everything behind a private tunnel. Commenters reported blocked access, a surprise Rickroll, and a lively split between playful mischief and strict lock‑it‑down security.
A cheeky guide suggests fighting internet “door‑knocker” bots on your Secure Shell (SSH) login—the tool admins use to manage servers—by giving them weird greetings and a long, annoying banner. The idea: confuse sloppy bots so badly they wander off and remove you from their scan lists, saving you from blocking endless IPs. It’s playful, it’s petty, and the comment section turned into a tech slap-fight.
On one side, the pranksters: Bender practically throws open the gates—“test your bots” on mirror.newsdump.org—like it’s a county fair for malware. Then chaos: users report they can’t connect, with one wondering if they’ve been mistaken for a bot and another claiming they were greeted with a Rick Astley quote. Yes, the robots got Rickrolled, and somehow so did a human. Comedy gold.
Enter the skeptics: politelemon asks the obvious—“Don’t bots ignore version info?”—while the security hardliners roll in: exabrial flexes, “No key? Your packet goes into the blackhole,” arguing the only sane move is to hide everything behind a private tunnel like WireGuard (a VPN). Why toy with bots when you can vanish entirely?
So the room splits: prank the pests with goofy banners and weird version strings, or slam the door and go silent. Between blocked Safari tabs, a mystery “down” mirror, and a drive-by Rickroll, the vibe is pure internet: part hack, part meme, part holy war over how paranoid you should be.
Key Points
- •The objective is to keep SSH/SFTP publicly accessible while discouraging automated bots.
- •Requires OpenSSH 10 or later; an example sshd_config is referenced.
- •Using VersionAddendum alters the server version string to make poorly coded bots hang.
- •Adding a long SFTP banner (banner_sftp.txt) aims to clutter bot console output.
- •Admins should test locally, avoid production use, and verify with “sshd -T” before restarting sshd.