Country block/allow with iptables and ipset

Here is a simple way to restrict access to your server from country’s that you don’t want to be able to connect to your services. On website www.ipdeny.com you can find IP lists for specific country’s. With a simple script, you can regularly update those lists so that they are up-to-date with new addresses. In my case, I needed a way to allow some services only available from specific countries. You can also change logic a little bit and blocking only specific county. 

This will work on Linux server with installed iptables and ipset. Ipset will contain all addresses provided from ipdeny.com. 

First, if you don’t already have it, install ipset.

[root@server ~]# dnf install ipset

Then, you’ll need to create ipset array which will contain all addresses. 

ipset create allow_cc hash:net family inet hashsize 1024 maxelem 65536

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mysql_secure_installation: command not found

It’s always a good idea to do basic MySQL security measures after installing fresh version of MariaDB server. For this task, I always used “mysql_secure_installation” command, which was part of installation. Some time ago, I’ve got stucked when trying to do so on MariaDB version 10.7. After some searching around, I guess command was changed.

[root@server ~]# mysql_secure_installation
-bash: mysql_secure_installation: command not found

This is a correct way on newer MariaDB versions:

root@server ~]# mariadb-secure-installation
NOTE: RUNNING ALL PARTS OF THIS SCRIPT IS RECOMMENDED FOR ALL MariaDB
SERVERS IN PRODUCTION USE!  PLEASE READ EACH STEP CAREFULLY!
. . .

 

Permanent block ratelimited user with Rspamd and fail2ban

This one was a little tricky. I had few mail servers with a lot of accounts. I setup rspamd instance in proxy mode. Then I called rspamd on every mail server with postfix milter. Rspamd works beautifully, ratelimiting is very useful too. But I in case of abusive mail sender, I wanted to permanently block IP from which spam originated. You can’t permanently block IPs with rspamd because ratelimit module can’t add IP address to some file.

So Fail2ban came to mind. I setup fail2ban on my rspamd installation and create filter which watches rspamd log and wait for cases when ratelimit is triggered. When fail2ban counts 10 cases of triggered ratelimit, filter puts IP of ratelimited sender to special blacklist file (ip_blacklist_ratelimit.map) which is included in rspamd multimap  definition – permanent block. Spamer IP is blocked permanently this way. 

I had few cases when some users password was stolen and spam was sending. Fail2ban and rspamd sucsessfuly banned those IPs. I also created action which will notify administrator when fail2ban blocks IP.

Rspamd ratelimit config:


# limit outgoing authenticated users
user = { 
bucket = [ 
{ 
burst = 10; # capacity of 10 messages in bucket 
rate = "1 / 1min"; # leak 1 messages per minute 
}, 
{ 
burst = 100; # capacity of 100 messages in bucket 
rate = "30 / 60min"; # leak 30 messages per hour 
}] 
}
}

Rspamd multimap definition for blocking blacklisted IPs:


# block users exceeded ratelimits 5 times
IP_BLACKLIST_RATELIMIT {
type = "ip";
prefilter = "true";
map = "${LOCAL_CONFDIR}/local.d/maps/ip_blacklist_ratelimit.map";
action = "reject";
}

Fail2ban jail configuration:


[rspamd-ratelimit]
enabled = true
action = rspamd-banip
ratelimit-alert[name=Rspamd-ratelimit, dest=terminator@myemail.com]
backend = auto
filter = rspamd-ratelimit
logpath = /var/log/rspamd/rspamd.log
maxretry = 10
bantime = 3600

Fail2ban filter for rspamd – rspamd-ratelimit.conf:


# Fail2Ban filter for rspamd ratelimit
#
[INCLUDES]
before = common.conf
[Definition]
_daemon = rspamd_proxy
failregex = ^.*rspamd_proxy.*ip: .*?Ratelimit ".*?" exceeded

# Author: Igor Mazej

Fail2ban action for rspamd – rspamd-banip.conf:


#
# Author: Igor Mazej
#
#
[Definition]
actionstart = touch /etc/rspamd/local.d/maps/ip_blacklist_ratelimit.map
actionban = printf %%b "\n" >> /etc/rspamd/local.d/maps/ip_blacklist_ratelimit.map
actionunban = sed -i "//d" -i.backup /etc/rspamd/local.d/maps/ip_blacklist_ratelimit.map
[Init]

Magento – lock administration to specific country

Brute force attacks on Magenta administration are also very common issue, like with WordPress, well maybe a little less :). If you can’t lock your administrations on specific fixed IP addresses, than you can probably lock administration so that is accessible only from your country. Russia and China for example, are countries from which those kind of attacks are very common. So it is good idea to block them.

For this example, I’m doing this on Apache 2.4 with GeoIP module installed. Before you proceed, you should have installed geoip.

To have Magento administration accessible only from Germany (for example), add code bellow to your apache vhost configuration. This geoip was installed on CentOS 7, you should change path to GeoIP.dat accordingly to your installation. You should also change country code to the one that you want access from.

GeoIPEnable On
GeoIPDBFile /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} !^DE$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(index.php/)?admin/? [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [R=403,L]

Limit xmlrpc.php to only specific web clients

Xmlrpc.php is very common target of attacks. In most cases you don’t need xmlrpc, but if you use third-party apps like WordPress for iPhone or android or other editors, then xmlrpc is the one who communicates between them and your WordPress installation. If you’ll be using it, it can be good idea to limit access to it only from “browsers” that you are using to access it. In case bellow, I’m using iPhone WordPress app.

When access to xmlrpc.php via iphone app, you’ll see that access log looks like this:

[11/Jun/2017:19:45:08 +0200] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/2.0" 200 462 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_3_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/603.2.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/14F89 wp-iphone/7.7"

From this you can see that wp-iphone/7.7 is named as client. So this will be our key for nginx configuration. We’ll make rule that will only accept requests to xmlrpc.php from clients containing string “wp-iphone”. Other clients will be denied. This is not bulletproof of as web client can be easily spoofed, but it should block majority of attacks.

location = /xmlrpc.php {
if ($http_user_agent !~* "wp-iphone")
{
return 403;
}
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:<your_php_fpm_port>;
}

WordPress bruteforce protection with NGINX and limit_req / request limitation

WordPress installations are very common targets of brute force attacks. With this attacks, attacker tries countless username and password variations in order to guess login informations. As you can imagine that such abusive behavior on your WordPress can cause collapse of server. Very common are attacks on wp-login.php and xmlrpc.php. There is a simple way to limit allowed number of requests on specific file with limit_req. This module can limit processing rate of requests coming from a single IP address on your web server.

In order to protect your WordPress administration you can do something like this:

# prevent brute force attacks on wp-login.php
 location = /wp-login.php {
        limit_req zone=one burst=5 nodelay;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
 }

This will allow 5 request in 5 second “window”. When there’ll be more than 5 request in 5 seconds, Nginx will return 503 error until request rate slows down:

$ curl -I https://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-login.php 
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
Server: nginx

Of course, you can use limit_req to protect other systems besides WordPress to.

Ultimate NGINX configuration for WordPress

Most of the sites that I created are based on WordPress. WordPress is great platform for your sites if you take a little care for it. different kind of abusive behavior on Wordpress systems is very common. Weak points are in most cases plugins, themes and outdated code in general. Many times people think, that security of their websites is all about hosting provider, firewalls… It’s true to some point. But one of the most fundamental steps to better WordPress security is up to the end-user. Take care of your site, update it regularly, use only good plugins and themes… It’s so important that you take care for regular updates and fixes. Also, try to use as least plugins as possible. If you are using only one theme, delete the ones that you don’t use. If you’ll  use theme downloaded from internet, only use themes from good providers.

NGINX in combination with good configuration and cache system can make your website lightning fast and super responsive. Memcached, Redis, Opcache are also great for optimizing your site. You definitely want to check into them too. W3 Total Cache plugin is great and easy to configure. More about this another time.

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fail2ban – Error in FilterPyinotify callback: illegal IP address string passed to inet_aton

Just recently, I discovered great pice of software named fail2ban. Supreme way to provide some additional security to your server. But more about fail2ban next time. So, I configured my jail.local configuration, but getting errors in error log. This was the error:

Error in FilterPyinotify callback: illegal IP address string passed to inet_aton

Error is pretty self explanatory, my whitelisted IP’s defined in variable ignoreip were wrong. If you use commas (,) like I did, then there is your problem. Just replace commas with spaces and it should work fine.

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