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!
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 services well before putting them up in the 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 a small group of people, I’d recommend putting them behind a 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 to get rid of just those annoying requests, there’s really good tips already posted here.
Edit. Typos
I map them every day.
Ignore them, as long as your firewall is set up properly.
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).
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.
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
sometimes I grab popcorn and “tail -f /var/log/secure”
I use ACL where I add my home/work IPs as well as a few commonly used VPNs IPs as well. Cloudflare clocks known bots for me. Don’t see anything in the server logs, but I do see attempts on the CF side.
I am actually thinking about going back to Cloudflare tunnels. The only reason that I am hesitant is that I do use a fair amount of bandwidth as I host a mastodon server as well as a lemmy one. I don’t want to be stuck with a huge bandwidth bill.
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.
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?
Well I was expecting some form of notification for replies, but still, seen it now.
My understanding of this is limited having mostly gotten as far as you have and been satisfied.
For other bouncers, there’s actually a few decisions you can apply. By default the only decision is
BANwhich as the name suggests just outright blocks the IP at whatever level your bouncer runs at (L4 for firewall and L7 for nginx). The nginx bouncer can do more thought withCAPTCHAorCHALLENGEdecisions to allow false alerts to still access your site. I tried writing something similar for traefik but haven’t deployed anything yet to comment further.Wih updates, I don’t have them on automated, but I do occasionally go in and run a manual update when I remember (usually when I upgrade my OPNSense firewall that’s runs it). I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all to automate them, however the attack vectors don’t change that often. One thing to note, newer scenarios only run on the latest agent, something I discovered recently when trying to upgrade. I believe it will refuse to update them if it would cause them to break in this way, but test it yourself before enabling corn
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 stopped messing with port forwarding and reverse proxies and fail2ban and all the other stuff a long time ago.
Everything is accessible for login only locally, and then I add Tailscale (alternative would be ZeroTier) on top of it. Boom, done. Everything is seamless, I don’t have any random connection attempts clogging up my logging, and I’ve massively reduced my risk surface. Sure I’m not immune; if the app communicates on the internet, it must be regularly patched, and that I do my best to keep up with.
I’m using BunkerWeb which is an Nginx reverse-proxy with hardening, ModSecurity WAF, rate-limiting and auto-banning out of the box.
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’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 do client ssl verification.
Nobody but me or my household is supposed to access those anyway.
Any failure is a ban (I don’t remember how long for).
I also ban every IP not from my country, adjusting that sometimes if I travel internationally.
It’s much easier when you host stuff only for your devices (my case) and not for the larger public (like this lemmy instance).That sounds like an excellent solution for web based apps, but what about services like Plex or Nextcloud that use their own client side apps?
Some apps now have support for client certs (home-assistant ❤).
Nextcloud is one of the only apps that’s open without client ssl because it’d be highly inconvenient to share a file link with someone if I had to install a cert on their devices. Plex app never works right for me so I just use the browser. My TV is too old to have old built-in so I have a VM in which I use a browser to watch plex.
How do you have this set up? Is it possible to have a single verification process in front of several exposed services? Like as part of a reverse proxy?
Yes it’s running in my reverse proxy.
Nginx is doing my “client ssl verify” in front of my web services.
You can even do this on a per uri/location.
For example, my nextcloud is open without client certs so I can share files with people, but the admin settings path is protected by client ssl.Yup, there are many ways of doing that. Most reverse proxies should support basic auth (easy, but browser UX is terrible and it breaks websockets) or TLS client auth (even worse browser UX, phones are awful).
The best thing is do something like Caddy + Authelia (which is what I currently do with most things, with exceptions for specific user agents and IPs for apps that require it, aka non-browser stuff like Jellyfin),
Thanks. Authelia looks promising, but I can find anything about tls client auth.
Edit: actually maybe caddy supports this directly? https://caddyserver.com/docs/json/apps/http/servers/tls_connection_policies/client_authentication/
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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