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io, me e michele

Stop/Block Apache/Nginx hack attempts with fail2ban

Here is a useful quick post to stop hack attempts to your WordPress web server like wp-login brute force and xmlrpc exploits attacks.

First of all, install the package “fail2ban“:

sudo apt-get install fail2ban

Then add these two rules to your jail file on /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf

[web-xmlrpc]
enabled = true
port = http,https
filter = apache-xmlrpc
logpath = /var/log/nginx/*access.log
maxretry = 6

[web-wplogin]
enabled = true
port = http,https
filter = apache-wplogin
logpath = /var/log/nginx/*access.log
maxretry = 2
bantime = 86400
findtime = 600

Please change the logpath according to your web servers access logs

Now add two files on /etc/fail2ban/filter.d like web-wplogin.conf and web-xmlrpc.conf with respectively:

[Definition]
failregex = ^\ \-.*\"POST\ \/wp-login.php HTTP\/1\..*\"
ignoreregex =

and

[Definition]
failregex = ^ .*POST .*xmlrpc\.php.*
ignoreregex =

Restart fail2ban and wait, you can tail the log in the meanwhile:

tail -f /var/log/fail2ban.log

If you wanna check or manage the bans you can play with the fail2ban-client command.

Have fun.

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