Yup. I recently setup a new VM on a new cloud provider at work and that poor thing got hammered with 2-4 authentication requests per minute from the get-go. By

Yup. I recently setup a new VM on a new cloud provider at work and that poor thing got hammered with 2-4 authentication requests per minute from the get-go. By the time the UI of the cloud provider displayed the VM as running, there'd been 23 failed login requests already. I guess this means: if you're not careful, you might lose the VM before you can even login. Our base image now comes with a hardened sshd and raised firewalls so the first provisioning-run of the configuration management actually has to reduce the firewall protection.