Protecting your linux ssh server with fail2ban

Protecting your public servers is crucial we have talked before on a previous post on how to mitigate Ssh attacks on a cisco router now let’s talk Ssh on a server

an ssh server is no different you still have the same issues to fend off from DDOS attacks to brute force attacks ssh servers such as openssh are vulnerable here is a good module you can install on any Linux based server to protect again a brute force attack on your ssh tunnel ,

There is a free open source product called fail2ban   www.fail2ban.org/ 

this free solution scans logs files of the ssh service and looks for a set of criteria mostly an x amount of failed login attempts on the ssh service   and then creates a rule in the iptables firewall which will drop all future traffic to the ssh port it also supports ftp applications such as pure ftp in the same way

The below steps assume you are using a debian based distribution of Linux in our example we are using Ubuntu server 12.04


To install this application run the following command from your terminal window

sudo apt-get install fail2ban

Once the package is installed we can now start configuring it 
Fail2ban uses a file called jail.conf to set the parameters for things like maximum attempts
Before banning the offending IP

the location of the jail.conf file is  /etc/fail2ban

Once in the proper directory we can edit the config file using a text editor i personally like the VI editor

So you would issue the following command 

sudo vi jail.conf

This will open the fail 2 ban configuration file
In this configuration file you are going to look for a section that looks like this

[ssh]

enabled  = true
port     = ssh
filter   = sshd
logpath  = /var/log/auth.log
maxretry = 3

the above configuration allows for 3 unsuccessful attempts (default is 6 ) before banning the offending IP address   you can change the log file name and path if you like also by default there will be a # symbol before enable you will want to remove that symbol the enable this rule or you can just copy and paste the config above  

Once you have matched the default config to the one above you will then save the file in the vi editor using the :wq combination in command mode within the vi editor 

you have now completed the setup of fail2ban for the ssh service 

View Banned IP addresses 

In order to see what IP's have been banned issue the following command

sudo iptables -L -n

look through the output for the fail2ban chain 
Banned IP addresses will shows up like the one below in bold

Chain fail2ban-ssh (1 references)
target     prot opt source               destination        
RETURN     all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0   
Drop  all - 10.10.10.10                    0.0.0.0/0


Remove banned ip addresses

in order to remove a IP address from the banned list issues the following command 

sudo iptables -D fail2ban-ssh -s 10.10.10.10 -j DROP

this will allow the IP  on the server 


The following  post shows how to protect again bruteforce attacks on linux based ssh servers 
using the fail2ban application this tool is a simple and free yet powerful application that should be installed to add a layer of protection to you servers ssh service

Till next time

Stay secure !