As cybersecurity threats become more sophisticated, businesses of all sizes face an ongoing challenge: how do you keep sensitive websites and internal applications secure from hackers, bots, and automated scanning tools? Simply relying on traditional cybersecurity measures such as firewalls, VPNs, and Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) isn’t enough anymore. With SSHepherd, you can make your websites completely invisible.
Why Make Your Websites Invisible?
You might wonder why you’d want your website to be invisible at all. Consider these scenarios:
- Your company has internal business applications, such as an employee portal, HR systems, or expense management platforms, which should only be accessible internally.
- You operate in regulated industries such as finance or healthcare and want to ensure your sensitive data is not discoverable by malicious actors.
- Government or military sectors that require exceptionally secure and undiscoverable digital infrastructure.
- You have a SaaS platform or confidential service intended only for authorized subscribers and want to prevent unauthorized discovery.
- You’re launching a new website or product and want to control who sees and accesses it initially.
These scenarios highlight situations where traditional cybersecurity solutions, even when properly configured, simply can’t guarantee complete protection from today’s threats.
The Problem with Open Ports and Traditional Security
To understand why SSHepherd is necessary, let’s discuss how websites typically function. Normally, websites run over open ports—specifically HTTP (port 80) and HTTPS (port 443). The problem with these open ports is they’re highly discoverable.
Automated scanning tools like Shodan, Censys, Nmap, Masscan, and even botnets continually scan the internet, identifying websites, their open ports, and even the specific operating systems and services they run. Once discovered, your site becomes a target for more intensive reconnaissance, data scraping by AI-driven crawlers, credential stuffing attacks, brute-force login attempts, and potential zero-day exploits.
Traditional security solutions—firewalls, VPNs, and WAFs—often react after the site is discovered, but by then, the attackers have already gathered valuable reconnaissance data or have scraped sensitive information. VPN gateways themselves can become vulnerabilities, offering hackers another attack vector.
How SSHepherd Solves the Discovery Problem
Unlike traditional security products, SSHepherd approaches cybersecurity by making your websites entirely invisible from the start. It does this by completely closing HTTP and HTTPS ports—so when someone scans your IP addresses, there’s simply nothing there. No open ports mean no visibility; hackers and bots can’t find your site at all.
You might wonder how legitimate, authorized users can still access a site that’s invisible. SSHepherd solves this by using secure, encrypted tunnels initiated by a dedicated SSHepherd application. Only users with pre-authorized access through this app can open a secure tunnel to the hidden site, thus gaining seamless access without exposing the website publicly.
Practical Example: A Real-World Demo
Here’s a simple demonstration to illustrate how SSHepherd works:
I set up two sample websites:
- Employee Portal hosted on Microsoft IIS (typically accessed over HTTPS, port 443).
- Healthcare Portal running on Apache (typically accessed via HTTP, port 80).
In my Azure network configuration, I’ve explicitly set port 443 and port 80 to deny all inbound traffic.
Running an nmap scan on both servers shows that there are no open ports. Additionally, in GoDaddy, the DNS settings point the site’s IP addresses to localhost rather than to publicly accessible IP addresses.
To access these invisible websites, users launch the SSHepherd control application. Within this launcher, they click to open an encrypted tunnel, which securely and privately routes their browser to the hidden website—without ever exposing it to the internet. Once the tunnel is closed, the sites are again unreachable, maintaining complete invisibility.
The Key Benefits of SSHepherd
Here’s what you get by using SSHepherd:
- Complete invisibility: Your websites cannot be detected by hackers, bots, AI-driven scanners, or automated indexing tools.
- Reduced attack surface: No open ports means there’s no point of entry to target.
- Strict Access Control: Only authorized users with the SSHepherd control app can access protected sites.
- Data protection: Because the site is invisible, sensitive data stays safe from reconnaissance and scraping attempts.
- Enhanced Compliance: Perfect for regulated environments such as healthcare, finance, and government, providing the highest possible level of digital security.
Conclusion: Redefining Cybersecurity
The bottom line is this: If your site is publicly discoverable, it’s vulnerable. SSHepherd offers an entirely different approach—one that stops attacks before they start by keeping your sites invisible. Rather than simply blocking or responding to threats, SSHepherd ensures your websites are never discovered in the first place, dramatically enhancing security and peace of mind. To find out more about how SSHepherd can help make your critical sites invisible, secure, and fully protected, visit us at fullarmor.com.