Within minutes of spinning up a droplet, logs show Chinese IP address probing. Normal?

November 10, 2015 3.8k views
Monitoring DigitalOcean Logging
jasonlough
By:
jasonlough

I spun up a ubuntu / node server. I went through and added a public key. I disabled root access. Now Im experimenting with nginx. I stumble with that so I check the logs in 

/var/log/nginx/access.log

I expected to see only my IP and connections.

I see several IPs that arent mine, one of which is

182.118.53.12

Which I looked up the owner for and found

China Unicom Henan

This droplet is literally hours old, with nothing on it but Ubuntu, Node, and Nginx.

It seems the Chinese are systematically probing each new droplet created.

Is this concerning, or business as usual?

1 comment
  • ktretyak November 12, 2015

    In my case /var/log/secure grows to 1.5 MB per day - it failed logins from Chinese IP-address. They try to login under root and less under other logins…

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1 Answer
gparent November 10, 2015

This is not uncommon.

Reply
  • jasonlough November 10, 2015

    Really? Seems … i dunno… wrong somehow? I dont know why, I mean theyre welcome to watch me fumble around with nginx but geez. They must have a way to systematically find every new spun up droplet, which seems ominous. Security must be a nightmare.

    • ryanpq MOD November 10, 2015

      It is not that they know when a new droplet is spun up. Rather these are automated scans or botnets that are scanning whole blocks of IP addresses. You will see this type of thing with any server you place on the public Internet.

    • dusty225 November 11, 2015

      Hi Jason,

      I just got a droplet myself, first one, just to play with. When I went to monitor the traffic hitting it, I’ve been very surprised. I guess that shows that I’m not a network admin, but I’ve logged over 15k unique ip connection attempts to my ip port 22 the last 24 hours (or about 10 per minute). I was thinking exactly what you said “security must be a nightmare”.

      gp+digitalocean has been responding to me also.

      https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/network-analyzer-constant-flow-of-icmp-packets-to-myip-ssh?comment=39798

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