Selfhosted

55083 readers

455 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world

HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz

143

How do I avoid becoming one with the botnet? (programming.dev)

submitted 2 days ago by bitcrafter@programming.dev to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

67 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I find the idea of self-hosting to be really appealing, but at the same time I find it to be incredibly scary. This is not because I lack the technical expertise, but because I have gotten the impression that everyone on the Internet would immediately try to hack into it to make it join their bot net. As a result, I would have to be constantly vigilant against this, yet one of the numerous assailants would only have to succeed once. Dealing with this constant threat seems like it would be frightening enough as a full-time job, but this would only be a hobby project for me.

How do the self-hosters on Lemmy avoid becoming one with the botnet?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

Yikes, lot's of bad advice in this thread.

My advice: Go develop an actual threat model and find and implement mitigations to the threats you've identified.

If you can't do that, that's totally okay; it's a skill that takes a lot of time and effort to learn and is well-compensated in the industry.

You will need to pay for it. Either through an individual assessment by someone who knows what they're doing, managed hosting services where the hoster is contractually liable and has implemented such measures, by risking becoming part of a botnet or by not hosting in a world-public manner.

My recommendations:

Pay for proper managed hosting for every part of your system that you are not capable of securing yourself. This is a general rule that even experienced people follow by i.e. renting a VPS rather than exposing their own physical HW. There are multiple grades to this such as SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.
Research, evalue and implement low-hanging fruit measures that massively reduce the attack surface. One such measure would be to not host in a manner that is accessible to the entire world and instead pay for managed authenticated access that is limited to select people (i.e. VPN such as Tailscale)
git gud