So I’m the server admin and web developer for my school’s robotics team. I look through the servers access logs every once in a while just to check on things. I keep seeing requests that look like someone’s scanning for vulns. But I’m seeing something I’ve never seen before. It looks like someone is sending requests in machine code and I have no idea why or what it would do???
here’s the request:
"\x03\x00\x00\x13\x0E\xE0\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x08\x00\x02\x00\x00\x00" 400 166 "-" "-"


Yeah, its running a website. All ports are on default deny except 22, 80, 443, and 9050. 9050 is for the onion version of the site, and 80 auto-redirects to the https version of the site. 22 is rate limited to help protect against brute-force attacks. The requests are coming from multiple IPs, some of them are 117.72.47.192, 172.71.184.89, and 162.158.87.100. the one that sent that specific packet is 82.147.85.33 and no user agent is provided. Most of the malicious packets have user agents attached, but that specific one doesn’t I also am seeing another weird one sent by 138.197.16.14
"238\x00ll|'|'|SGFjS2VkX0Q3NUU2QUFB|'|'|WIN-QZN7FJ7D1O|'|'|Administrator|'|'|19-11-28|'|'||'|'|Win 10 Pro x64|'|'|No|'|'|S17|'|'|..|'|'|SW5ib3ggLSBPdXRsb29rIERhdGEgRmlsZSAtIE1pY3Jvc29mdCBPdXRsb29rAA==|'|'|" 400 166 "-" "-"they’re all attack attempts. set up fail2ban, enforce ssh key-based authentication, run it in a non standard port and create firewall allow lists for trusted users, networks or countries if you can. make sure everything is patched frequently.
expect consequences for running onion hidden services - captchas and denied service for that IP address, but also attacks against the hidden service itself.
Probably best to keep the ssh key-based authentication…
ah yeah I meant to type “enable”.
thanks - changed