Hit 10,000 blocked threats on my home firewall and got curious

I set up pfSense about 6 months ago on an old Dell Optiplex. Checked the dashboard last week and saw it blocked 10,247 incoming connection attempts. Most were just port scans from China and Russia but still. Made me wonder how many of those would be actual bad actors if I was running something vulnerable. Does anyone else check their firewall logs just out of curiosity or am I being paranoid?

2 comments

2 Comments

schmidt.grace20d ago

It's wild how this kind of thing starts to bleed into your daily awareness though. Like I always thought I was just being cautious with my firewall setups (and yeah, I also check my logs way too often, it's oddly satisfying), but now I find myself side-eyeing random devices everywhere. My neighbor's WiFi camera, my friend's smart thermostat, even the coffee shop's payment terminal - I can't help but wonder what kind of garbage is being thrown at them, you know? It makes me think we're all just one unprotected port away from being part of some botnet.

gibson.robert20d ago

Oh man, you're totally right! I actually heard about a study where researchers set up a fake coffee shop with a "smart" payment terminal and within a week they had like 200 devices trying to connect to it from people just walking by. Freaked me out because I use those terminals all the time. @schmidt.grace hit the nail on the head about checking logs being satisfying though - I started doing that after reading about some guy who caught a bot knocking on his printer port at 3am and traced it back to a whole network of hacked IoT things. Makes you wonder what else is lurking out there!