I think Debian is probably pretty conservative in their updates. I also recommend checking out the needrestart package. It will tell you when a reboot is needed because of a newer kernel that was installed, or when a systemd service needs a restart.

But as another commenter noted, outside of self hosting, in enterprise businesses environments where you manage an army of servers, things look different. But then, these guys are paid to be on-call in the weekend for events like these. :)

Well, we’re talking (Debian’s) security updates only here, not major PHP version jumps. :)

Yeah, for businesses I can see that, but selfhosting, meh. I have just one personal server firewalled and Wireguarded, so the PHP vulnerability wasn’t even publicly exposed. Even so, I have never had any issues with Debian’s unattended security upgrades in the last 5 years.

In enterprise environments with a hundred servers, though, you will want to do something else than I do. :)

But even then, don’t enterprises run a good WAF in front of their public web sites that would have received the patch automatically?

Don’t people use unattended upgrades? Crowdsec’s WAF AppSec or Cloudfare’s WAF also put out patches that would’ve caught these vulnerabilities before the official PHP patches were released.

Of course, those normally run once per 24 hours, which is a little late…

Why do you expose port 22 to the entire internet? Limit it to your own IP addresses and/or only allow access through your Wireguard/VPN ranges. Then changing the default port becomes meaningless.

wazuh

Oh hey, thanks for that. I have eyed Sandfly before for filesystem drift detection among other things, but I don’t think they have a free tier (anymore?). I also ran into Lynis, which performs health and compliance scans of your systems. Lots of good information and general hardening advice from that.