Iptables – Denyhosts vs fail2ban vs iptables- best way to prevent brute force logons

brute-force-attacksdenyhostsfail2baniptables

I'm setting up a LAMP server and need to prevent SSH/FTP/etc. brute-force logon attempts from succeeding. I've seen many recommendations for both denyhosts and fail2ban, but few comparisons of the two. I also read that an IPTables rule can fill the same function.

Why would I choose one of these methods over another? How do people on serverfault handle this problem?

Best Answer

IIRC, DenyHosts will only watch your SSH service. If you need it to protect other services as well, Fail2ban is definitely a better choice. It is configurable to watch nearly any service if you are willing to tweak its configuration, but that shouldn't be necessary as the newer versions of Fail2ban include rulesets which are suitable for many popular server daemons. Using fail2ban over a simple iptables rate limit has the advantage of completely blocking an attacker for a specified amount of time, instead of simply reducing how quickly he can hammer your server. I've used fail2ban with great results on a number of production servers and have never seen one of those servers breached by a brute force attack since I've started using it.

Related Solutions

Ssh – fail2ban and denyhosts constantly ban me on Ubuntu

I believe I've seen someone say that some of those apps will count failed key logins as a brute force attempt. Do you have an ssh-agent running with keys in it? Connecting with that set will offer every key in turn before falling back to password, so that might be why. Try setting sshd's log level higher, and check fail2ban/denyhost logs.

Edit: here is the original source that tipped me off, with a way to fix it.

Linux – best way to clear all iptables rules

To answer your question succinctly, no: there would not be any "leftover" rules after flushing every table. In the interest of being thorough however, you may want to set the policy for the built-in INPUT and FORWARD chains to ACCEPT, as well:

iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -F
iptables -X

Clear ip6tables rules:

ip6tables -P INPUT ACCEPT
ip6tables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
ip6tables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
ip6tables -t nat -F
ip6tables -t mangle -F
ip6tables -F
ip6tables -X

...and that should do it. iptables -nvL should produce this (or very similar) output:

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
 pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
 pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
 pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination

Best Answer

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Ssh – fail2ban and denyhosts constantly ban me on Ubuntu

Linux – best way to clear all iptables rules

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