I see this claim all the time, and it bugs me every time. Obfuscation is a perfectly reasonable part of a defense in depth solution. That's why you configure your error messages on production systems to give very generic error messages instead of the dev-centric messages with stack traces on lower environments, for example.
The problem comes when obscurity is your only defense. It's not a full remediation on its own, but it has a part in defense in depth.
Changing the port isn't really much obfuscation though. It doesn't take long to scan all ports for the entire IPv4 range (see masscan)
It helps against stupid automated attacks though.
If someone has changed the port it's likely that they have set up a great password or disabled password auth all together.
It's worth it for just having cleaner logs and fewer attempts.
It’s worth it for just having cleaner logs
Those logs are useful to know which IPs to permanently block :)
I see this claim all the time, and it bugs me every time. Obfuscation is a perfectly reasonable part of a defense in depth solution. That's why you configure your error messages on production systems to give very generic error messages instead of the dev-centric messages with stack traces on lower environments, for example.
The problem comes when obscurity is your only defense. It's not a full remediation on its own, but it has a part in defense in depth.
Changing the port isn't really much obfuscation though. It doesn't take long to scan all ports for the entire IPv4 range (see masscan)
It helps against stupid automated attacks though.
If someone has changed the port it's likely that they have set up a great password or disabled password auth all together.
It's worth it for just having cleaner logs and fewer attempts.
Those logs are useful to know which IPs to permanently block :)
Technically a password is obfuscation anyway