Eliminate Your SSH Attack Surface with Cloudflare Tunnel
I got tired of it.
Genuinely tired.
Every time I’d tail the auth log on my server, it was just wall-to-wall garbage — bots hammering SSH from all over the world, all day, every day.
I’d done the usual stuff: changed the port, set up fail2ban, whitelisted IPs.
And honestly? It still felt like playing whack-a-mole.
So I finally just said forget it and closed the port entirely.
No port, no problem.
The approach is simple: route all SSH access through Cloudflare Tunnel and don’t expose port 22 (or any other port) to the internet at all.
This covers both macOS Terminal and Windows PuTTY, since I use both depending on where I’m working.
Server is Rocky Linux 9.7, for reference.