Avoiding Paranoia 11. Avoiding Paranoia Fine. Everything is working. But every day or so the logs are showing all kinds of failed connection attempts.
Some people overreact to what they see in their logs.
The most common attempts are a combination of mistakes, legitimate attempts based on the history of the internet, misunderstandings, curiousity, and harmless, primitive hacking. For more serious attempts, there is no clear cut answer. It's going to depend on your own personality and comfort level, and what you personally define a serious attempt to be. With that in mind, here's my personal advice. Ignore individual, isolated, single connection attempts to one of telnet, ssh, ftp, finger or any other port for a typical service which you are not providing.