Confuse some SSH bots and make botters block you.

Goal: Intentionally allow public SSH and/or SFTP to most of the internet while giving some SSH bots something to think about rather than entirely blocking them.<br>Get the botter to exclude us rather than us having to whack-a-mole their 250,000+ IP adddresses each.

Precaution: Test locally first and/or be logged into a out-of-band console to test. Do not use in production. May break some unmaintained SSH API clients using old libraries.

Example sshd_config using OpenSSH 10.<br>Ensure one is on OpenSSH 10 or later.

The VersionAddendum will cause most poorly coded bots to hang,<br>thus causing the botter to exclude us from their scans rather than us having to block them.

sshd -V<br>OpenSSH_10.0p2, OpenSSL 3.5.4 30 Sep 2025

Add a long annoying banner_sftp.txt banner to crap up some bot console output.

Verify SSH may restart correctly:

sshd -T<br># if good, then restart sshd.

Browse this directory.