April 30, 2026
The bots are at the door 🐑
Who Is That Knocking at My (SSH) Door?
Internet randos keep rattling the doorknob — and commenters are utterly over it
TLDR: A website owner discovered hundreds of strangers trying to guess their login in just one week, proving the internet is full of people rattling every doorknob they can find. Commenters were split between shrugging that this is totally normal and flexing even stricter ways to make those attacks invisible and useless.
A blogger peeked at the digital front door of their website and found the usual parade of online pests: nearly 500 login tries in a week, with classics like admin, user, and guest showing up, plus a weirdly funny frontrunner: sheep. The big reveal wasn’t that strangers are constantly trying to break in — apparently that’s old news to the internet veterans — but which names they guessed, from software brands to suspiciously human names like Stephen and Nina. That last bit sparked the article’s most relatable joke: congrats, your terrible password habits may now be part of some scammer’s playbook.
But the real fireworks came from the comments, where the community mood was basically: "welcome to the internet, rookie." One commenter delivered a brutally dry eye-roll, saying this has been happening for literal decades and advising the author to stop being surprised and just block repeat offenders harder. Another took the even more extreme route: why leave the front door visible at all? They bragged about hiding access behind WireGuard, a private tunnel that stays quiet unless you already have the secret key — making nosy scanners get nothing back.
So the vibe was part security PSA, part veteran hazing ritual. The article says, sensibly, to turn off password sign-ins and ban suspicious visitors fast. The commenters? They turned it into a classic tech pile-on: this is normal, your setup should be stricter, and also lol at “sheep.”
Key Points
- •The server discussed in the article is tightly locked down, with only necessary ports open and SSH password authentication disabled.
- •The author observed nearly 500 SSH login attempts over seven days, while using fail2ban to block repeat offenders.
- •At the time of writing, the fail2ban blocklist contained more than 100 IP addresses.
- •The most attempted username was 'sheep' with 169 attempts, followed by common names such as 'admin', 'user', 'test', 'guest', and 'ubuntu'.
- •The article concludes by recommending disabling password authentication, using strong passwords even on test systems, and banning suspicious SSH attempts.