Hit 100,000 blocked attacks on my home firewall, no idea how to feel

Ran the logs on my pfSense box in Columbus last week and the counter showed exactly 100,347 blocked connection attempts since January. Most are just botnet scanners hitting port 443, but about 1,200 were actual brute force SSH tries from three IP ranges I blacklisted. Has anyone else crossed a big number like this and just stared at the screen wondering if they should be impressed or worried?

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gray61mo ago

Those 100k numbers are just noise, man. Every box on the internet gets hammered by scanners, it's like complaining about rain in Seattle. The real question is why you're even exposing SSH to the whole world in the first place. Move it to a nonstandard port, force key auth, or just VPN in. That 1,200 brute force count is actually embarrassing, it means your config was weak enough that bots kept trying. If your setup was tight, they'd have given up after a week or two. Honestly, the impressive number would be zero blocked because nothing even got close to your services.

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