Setup & Harden a Linux Server in 2026

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you spin up a fresh Linux box today, it's not "new" for long. The moment it's reachable, it's being scanned, prodded, and occasionally hammered by automated traffic. That's not paranoia, it's just the background noise of the modern internet. Honeypot data has been consistent for years: a brand-new instance with a public IP will typically see its first SSH probe within minutes, and credential-stuffing attempts shortly after.

Cloud providers have made it trivially easy to create compute instances. What they haven't done is make them safe by default. You still get a general-purpose system with a wide attack surface, and it's on you to reduce that surface before you put anything meaningful on it.

Linux on tigger.dev

Setup & Harden a Linux Server in 2026