As you’ve probably heard me say before, if you have a public facing Linux server, meaning one or more open or forwarded ports, Fail2Ban absolutely must be installed. Fail2Ban monitors log files for excessive login attempts, also called Brute Force attacks. They are extremely common place on the internet. I have never had a public facing server that has gone more than a few days without some hacker trying to brute force it. These attacks go like this. Someone writes a script, or uses a program, that reads a bunch of possible usernames from a text file that has nothing but millions of usernames. There is also a text file with millions of passwords. The script will attempt to go through all username and password combinations until it finds one that can login successfully. Obviously, if you get a hundred or more login attempts from one IP address, nothing good will ever come from that IP so it pretty safe to assume it should be blocked, at least for some period of time.
Fail2Ban does precisely this. It constantly watches any log file you tell it to watch, and when a certain number of login attempts are logged from an IP address, Fail2Ban will automatically create an iptables rule to block all traffic from that IP address for a given period of time. Because brute force attacks take a long, long time, blocking one early on pretty much eliminates the possibility of a successful attack. SSH is the most common service / port for brute force attacks, from my experience. With FTP and POP3 (email) coming in second and third. It’s a no-brainer to set up Fail2Ban to automatically block attacks. It gives you much needed protection and security for your servers. So, here we go.
How to Install Fail2Ban on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty)
First and foremost, let’s make sure apt is updated.
# sudo apt-get update
Now we can install Fail2Ban. Since there is an aptitude package already, we will use that to install.
# sudo apt-get install fail2ban
Surprisingly, that’s all you need to do to install it. You do, however, need to edit the main configuration file for Fail2Ban, which is jail.conf. Lets go ahead and open it up with nano and take a look.
# sudo nano /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf
