SSH

Securing SSH Service on Fedora/RHEL/CentOS

So you’ve deployed your new VPS or cloud server and SSH is served up on port 22 with password authentication. If you’re reading this, you already know that’s entirely insecure and just begging to be attacked. I’ll detail my procedure for hardening SSH on Fedora Linux, the distro I run. This should also work on downstream RHEL and CentOS, and broadly speaking on any SSH server, though some bits may differ.

XML-RPC test code

Two Ways to Fully Disable WordPress XML-RPC

Back several years ago when XML-RPC attacks on WordPress were prevalent, I shared some techniques here for selectively countering such attacks. Most users, however, just want to shut XML-RPC off completely. They often land on the widely installed Disable XML-RPC plugin. This plugin unfortunately does not fully work. Let me show you why, share some better solutions, and update my unit testing code for Python 3 in the process.

banned

Countering WordPress XML-RPC Attacks with fail2ban

In my last post I began inquiring into the WordPress XML-RPC attacks I’ve been sustaining here on the site. Since then I’ve been further studying the threat and experimenting with responses, and I have now developed working countermeasures and cast them into live operation. These countermeasures involve forwarding telemetry out of WordPress for pickup by the fail2ban facility, allowing for the detection and banning of attackers trying to exploit xmlrpc.php. Where other recommendations call for disabling affected methods or the whole XML-RPC subsystem, my more refined techniques control attacks while maintaining the full service set in operation for valid procedure calls. …

SSH Scans by Region

Network Attackers: Where In The World 3

Two previous rounds of analysis using IP geolocation with Whois (Part 1 and Part 2) revealed that 40% to 45% of network intrusion attempts arriving at my public-facing SSH port could be traced back to Chinese hackers, and 20% to 25% to attackers in Russia and Eastern Europe. The tally is now in from a third round of observations, boasting a significantly longer integration period (more than four months versus about six to seven weeks in the earlier rounds) and yielding plenty of interesting and even unexpected results. …

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