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Server Security \/ March 2026<\/p>\n
The patterns showing up in server logs over recent months suggest that the attack surface has shifted in some fairly predictable ways. A few straightforward measures appear to address the bulk of it.<\/p>\n
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Anyone running a public-facing server and watching their This is not particularly surprising. A low-cost VPS can be provisioned in seconds, carries a clean IP not yet on most blocklists, and can be destroyed without a trace once a campaign is complete. It would appear this has become a fairly common setup for automated credential testing.<\/p>\n This is not a criticism of Digital Ocean specifically. The same pattern appears across AWS, Vultr, Linode and others. It is simply where the activity seems most concentrated at present, based on log observation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Once you can identify where the traffic is coming from, blocking it at the network level before it reaches your services is relatively straightforward.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Blocking individual IPs as they appear is largely ineffective since the same underlying infrastructure will simply rotate addresses. Watching for patterns across a few days and then blocking the entire subnet tends to be considerably more efficient.<\/p>\n Step 1: Extract the Top Attacking IPs<\/p>\n\/var\/log\/auth.log<\/code> or fail2ban output will likely notice something consistent: a notable proportion of brute force and port scanning activity appears to originate from Digital Ocean IP ranges.<\/p>\nWatching the Logs and Blocking at Range Level<\/h2>\n