Background: 15 years of experience in software and apparently spoiled because it was already set up correctly.
Been practicing doing my own servers, published a test site and 24 hours later, root was compromised.
Rolled back to the backup before I made it public and now I have a security checklist.
Paranoid external security. I’m assuming you already have a domain name. I’m also assuming you have some ICANN anonymization setup.
This is your local reverse Proxy. You can manage all this with a container called nginx proxy manager, but it could benefit you to know it’s inner workings first. https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-does-it-work/
https://cloud9sc.com/nginx-proxy-manager-hardening/
https://github.com/NginxProxyManager/nginx-proxy-manager
Next you’ll want to proxy your IP address as you don’t want that pointing to your home address
https://developers.cloudflare.com/learning-paths/get-started-free/onboarding/proxy-dns-records/
Remote access is next. I would suggest setting up wireguard on a machine that’s not your webserver, but you can also set that up in a container as well. Either way you’ll need to punch another hole in your router to point to your wire guard bastion host on your local network. It has many clients for windows and linux and android and IOS
https://github.com/angristan/wireguard-install
https://www.wireguard.com/quickstart/
https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-wireguard
Now internally, I’m assuming you’re using Linux. In that case I’d suggest securing your ssh on all machines that you log into. On the machines you’re running you should also install fail2ban, UFW, git, and some monitoring if you have the overhead but the monitoring part is outside of the purview of this comment. If you’re using UFW your very first command should be
sudo ufw allow sshhttps://www.howtogeek.com/443156/the-best-ways-to-secure-your-ssh-server/
https://github.com/fail2ban/fail2ban
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/ufw-essentials-common-firewall-rules-and-commands
Now for securing internal linux harden the kernel and remove root user. If you do this you should have a password manager setup. keepassx or bitwarden are ones I like. If those suck I’m sure someone will suggest something better. The password manager will have the root password for all of your Linux machines and they should be different passwords.
https://www.makeuseof.com/ways-improve-linux-user-account-security/
https://bitwarden.com/help/self-host-an-organization/
https://keepass.info/
Finally you can harden the kernel
https://codezup.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-hardening-your-linux-system-with-kernel-parameters/
TLDR: it takes research but a good place to start is here
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/recommended-security-measures-to-protect-your-servers
Correct, horse battery staple.
I couldn’t justify putting correct in my username on Lemmy. But I loved the reference too much not to use it, so here I am, a less secure truncated version of a better password.