When I first got into self hosting, I originally wanted to join the Fediverse by hosting my own instance. After realizing I am not that committed to that idea, I went into a simpler direction.

Originally I was using Cloudflare’s tunnel service. Watching the logs, I would get traffic from random corporations and places.

Being uncomfortable with Cloudflare after pivoting away from social media, I learned how to secure my device myself and started using an uncommon port with a reverse proxy. My logs now only ever show activity when I am connecting to my own site.

Which is what lead me to this question.

What do bots and scrapers look for when they come to a site? Do they mainly target known ports like 80 or 22 for insecurities? Do they ever scan other ports looking for other common services that may be insecure? Is it even worth their time scanning for open ports?

Seeing as I am tiny and obscure, I most likely won’t need to do much research into protecting myself from such threats but I am still curious about the threats that bots pose to other self-hosters or larger platforms.