Nice, but the bots may not understand the joke.

And not only that but they will tag the domain with ”there is something here”, and maybe some day someone will take a closer look and see if you are all up-to-date or would there maybe be a way in. So better to just drop everything and maybe also ban the IP if they happen to try poke some commonly scanned things (like /wp-admin, /git, port 22 etc.) GoAccess is a pretty nice tool to show you what they are after.

Not at hand no, but I’m sure any of the LLMs can guide you through the setup if googling does not give anything good.

Nothing very special about all this, well maybe the subdir does require some extra spells to reverse proxy config.

Use a reverse proxy (caddy or nginx proxy manager) with a subdomain, like myservice.mydomain.com (maybe even configure a subdir too, so …domain.com/guessthis/). Don’t put anything on the main domain / root dir / the IP address.

If you’re still unsure setup Knockd to whitelist only IP addresses that touch certain one or two random ports first.

So security through obscurity :) But good luck for the bots to figure all that out.

VPN is of course the actually secure option, I’d vote for Tailscale.

Don’t know why exactly are you downvoted but this is exactly what is going on as cars get more ”connected”, following Tesla & BYD lead. Just like with phones at the moment, everything tries to spy on you a little to tap into that sweeet targeted ad revenue, or something else.

For example I bet the insurance companies love to have some driver behaviour data about you, and the big retail likes to know where/what time you are on the move (though they already get it from the dozens of apps on your phone that have access to location data, like Google Maps).