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!
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
I would suggest crowdsec and not fail2ban
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?
A pentester here. Those bad looking requests are mostly random fuzzing by bots and sometimes from benign vulnerability scanners like Censys. If you keep your applications up date and credentials strong, there shouldn’t be much to worry about. Of course, you should review the risks and possible vulns of every web application and other service well before putting them up in public. Search for general server hardening tips online if you’re unsure about your configuration hygiene.
An another question is, do you need to expose your services to the public. If they are purely private or for the small group of people, I would put them behind VPN. Wireguard is probably the easiest one to set up and so transparent you wouldn’t likely even notice it’s there while using it.
But if you really want need get rid of just those annoying requests, there’s really good tips already posted here.
Fail2ban and Nginx Proxy Manager. Here’s a tutorial on getting started with Fail2ban:
I really wanted to use this and set it up a while ago. Works great but in the end I had to deactivate it, because my nextcloud instance would cause too many false positives (404s and such) and I would ban my own up way too often.
Crowdsec is more advanced
Does it integrate with NPM?
Yes it does! You find everything on the site. It is very well documented.
Ok, so I spent way too much time tonight trying to figure this out, made a mess of my npm, and fixed it.
It is very well documented.
Official documentation on using crowdsec with NPM is out of date and relies on a fork that’s no longer maintained. I’m trying to find any documentation on how to integrate the bouncer into the official NPM project and am really coming up empty.
You only need the unmaintaind version (official PR is in the works: https://github.com/NginxProxyManager/nginx-proxy-manager/pull/2677 ) if you want to bounce at the NPM level (aka: with a captcha). At the moment I am using crowdsec to parse the NPM logs (and some other logs) and bounce at the IP tables level on my VPS ( block only) and at the opnsense firewall level (also block only) at home.
I’m not sure if it’s the fact that I was up at 1am trying to figure this all out or what but it wasn’t clicking last night. So the NPM (nginx) integration would strictly be the captcha and I would need to bounce at the firewall to block? That makes way more sense to me now. Thanks.
No problem, crowdsec is not super simple. There is a new learning platform you need to check out! Feel free to DM me when you are stuck on something.
I mean, it’s not a big deal to have crawlers and bots poking at our webserver if all you do is serving static pages (which is common for a blog).
Now if you run code on server side (eg using PHP or python), you’ll want to retrieve multiple known lists of bad actors to block them by default, and setup fail2ban to block those that went through. The most important thing however is to keep your server up to date at all times.
I only expose services on IPv6, for now that seems to work pretty well - very few scanners (I encounter only 1 or 2 per week, and they seem to connect to port 80/443 only).
Must be nice living in a post 1995 country… theres only 1 or 2 ISPs in Australia that support ipv6…
Lol, I have heard some ISP horror stories from the Down Under.
I am fortunate enough that my country’s government has been forcing ISPs to implement IPv6 in their backbone infrastructure, so nowadays all I have to really do is to flick a switch on the router (unfortunately many routers still turn off IPv6 by default) to get an IPv6 connection.
Yeah the internet services here are really stuck in the past. Hard to tell if theyre taking advantage of the scarcity of ipv4 addresses to make more money somehow, or of theyre just too fuckn lazy
I’m guessing they’re on CG-NAT and someone upstairs thinks staying ipv4 reduces customer support costs.
Being put on CGNAT without IPv6 is terrifying.
Aussie supports full IPv6 and provide a /48
Isn’t that akin to security through obscurity… you might want one more layer of defense
I still have firewall (that blocks almost all incoming connections) and sshguard setup. I also check the firewall logs daily, blocking IPs that I find to be suspicious.
I could probably do better, but with so few scanners connecting to my home server, I have managed to sleep way better than back when I setup a server on IPv4!
Also, even if my home server gets attacked, at least I know that my other devices aren’t sharing the same IP with them… NAT-less is a godsend.
Nothing too fancy other than following the recommended security practices. And to be aware of and regularly monitor the potential security holes of the servers/services I have open.
Even though semi-related, and commonly frowned upon by admins, I have unattended upgrades on my servers and my most of my services are auto-updated. If an update breaks a service, I guess its an opportunity to earn some more stripes.
Why is unattended upgrades frowned upon? Seems like I good idea all round to me?
Mostly because stability is usually prioritized above all else on servers. There’s also a multitude of other legit reasons.
All the legit reasons mentioned in the blog post seem to apply to badly behaved client software. Using a good and stable server OS avoids most of the negatives.
Unattended Upgrades on Debian for example will by default only apply security updates. I see no reason why this would harm stability more than running a potentially unpatched system.
Hell, debian is usually so stable I would just run dist-upgrade on my laptop every morning.
The difference there is that I’d be working with my laptop regularly and would notice problems more quickly
Even though minimal, the risk of security patches introducing new changes to your software is still there as we all have different ideas on how/what correct software updates should look like.
Fair, I’d just rather have a broken system than a compromised one.
I’ve been using crowdsec with swag for quite some time. I set it up with a discord notifier. It’s very interesting to see the types of exploits that are probed and from each country. Crowdsec blocks just like fail2ban and seems to do so in a more elegant fashion.
I map them every day.
sometimes I grab popcorn and “tail -f /var/log/secure”
I use fail2ban and add detection (for example I noticed that after I implemented it for ssh, they started using SMTP for brute force, so had to add that one as well.
I also have another rule that observes fail2ban log and adds repeated offenders to a long term black list.
I did not, but it looks interesting, thanks
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- Turn off password login for SSH and only allow SSH keys
- Cloudflare tunnel
- Configure nginx to resolve the real IPs since it will now show a bunch of Cloudflare IPs. See discussion.
- Use Fail2ban or Crowdsec for additional security for anything that gets past Cloudflare and also monitor SSH logs.
- Only incoming port that needs to be open now is SSH. If your provider has a web UI console for your VPS you can also close the SSH port, but that’s a bit overkill.
I’m using BunkerWeb which is an Nginx reverse-proxy with hardening, ModSecurity WAF, rate-limiting and auto-banning out of the box.
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.
And you only need to give them your unencrypted data…
To be fair, you can configure Cloudflare to use you own certs.
@GlitzyArmrest Including for origins? If not, the point of CloudFlare is gone.
You can use a custom origin certificate, but that’s irrelevant when CloudFlare still re-encrypt everything to analyse the request in more detail. It does leave me torn when using it, I don’t use it on anything where sensitive plain text is flying around, especially authentication data (which is annoying when that’s the most valuable place to have the protection), but I do have it on my matrix homeserver as anything remotely important is E2EE anyway so there’s little they can gain, and with the amount of requests it gets some level of mitigation is desirable
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.
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