Changing your default SSH port

It’s not uncommon for bots to hit the default SSH port, 22. It can make your logs hard to navigate through and if you have alerts setup, expect them often.

One way to help with this is changing your default SSH port. Keep in mind, you should also take into account other security measures. But, for the sake of this tip, we’re just going focus on changing the port.

Let’s get started by logging into our server via SSH. We’ll need to edit our SSH config, we’re going to use `nano` but another editor like `vim` works too.

nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

You’ll see that `Port` is commented out and defaults to `22`. We’re just going to uncomment by removing the `#` and change the port to `60001`. Keep in mind that some ports are reserved. For a list of well known reserved ports, click here.

After you save the file, you want to restart your SSH service.

service sshd restart

Once it’s successful, you can logout and retry connecting. This time with the following:

ssh -p 60001 root@<ip>

We hope you enjoyed this. Follow us as we’ll be posting more useful tips :)