I put up a vps with nginx and the logs show dodgy requests within minutes, how do you guys deal with these?
Edit: Thanks for the tips everyone!
I’ve implemented bot blocker and some iptables rate limiting.
These requests are probably made by search/indexing bots. My personal server gets a quite a lot of these, but they rarely use any bandwidth.
The easiest choice (probably disliked by more savvy users) is to just enable cloudflare on your server. It won’t block the requests, but will stop anything malicious.
With how advanced modern scraping techniques are there is so much you can do. I am not an expert, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Fail2Ban is great and all, but Cloudflare provides such an amazing layer of protection with so little effort that it’s probably the best choice for most people.
You press a few buttons and have a CDN, bot attack protection, DDOS protection, captcha for weird connections, email forwarding, static website hosting… It’s suspicious just how much stuff you get for free tbh.
Fail2ban and Nginx Proxy Manager. Here’s a tutorial on getting started with Fail2ban:
Yes it does! You find everything on the site. It is very well documented.
Depends on what kind of service the malicious requests are hitting.
Fail2ban can be used for a wide range of services.
I don’t have a public facing service (except for a honeypot), but I’ve used fail2ban before on public ssh/webauth/openvpn endpoint.
For a blog, you might be well served by a WAF, I’ve used modsec before, not sure if there’s anything that’s newer.
Anything exposed to the internet will get probed by malicious traffic looking for vulnerabilities. Best thing you can do is to lock down your server.
Here’s what I usually do:
- Install and configure fail2ban
- Configure SSH to only allow SSH keys
- Configure a firewall to only allow access to public services, if a service only needs to be accessible by you then whitelist your own IP. Alternatively install a VPN
Seconded, not only is CrowdSec a hell of a lot more resource efficient (Go vs Python IIRC), having it download a list of known bad actors for you in advance really slows down what it needs to process in the first place. I’ve had servers DDoSed just by fail2ban trying to process the requests.
Hi,
Reading the thread I decided to give it a go, I went ahead and configured crowdsec. I have a few questions, if I may, here’s the setup:
- I have set up the basic collections/parsers (mainly nginx/linux/sshd/base-http-scenarios/http-cve)
- I only have two services open on the firewall, https and ssh (no root login, ssh key only)
- I have set up the firewall bouncer.
If I understand correctly, any attack detected will result in the ip being banned via iptables rule (for a configured duration, by default 4 hours).
- Is there any added value to run the nginx bouncer on top of that, or any other?
- cscli hub update/upgrade will fetch new definitions for collections if I undestand correctly. Is there any need to run this regularly, scheduled with let’s say a cron job, or does crowdsec do that automatically in the background?
