Configure Fail2Ban for permanent and persistent bans

If you’re running server, you probably know its exposed services are constantly being probed and attacks are being attempted against it. Fortunately, an extremely useful, nice and nifty tool is here to help: Fail2Ban.

Fail2Ban scans service’s log files for patterns defined as regular expressions and, if an offending pattern is found a certain number of times within a given time frame, the corresponding source IP is banned for a configurable time, using local firewall rules such as iptables.

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Using Fail2Ban to block WordPress login attacks

Introduction

WordPress is a very robust content-management system (CMS) that is free and open source. Because anyone can comment, create an account, and post on WordPress, many malicious actors have created networks of bots and servers that compromise and spam WordPress sites through brute-force attacks.

Fail2Ban is an intrusion prevention software framework that protects computer servers from brute-force attacks. Written in the Python programming language, it is able to run on POSIX systems that have an interface to a packet-control system or firewall installed locally.

Note: In this guide, we will be using version 0.9.6 of Fail2ban on an Debian 9.4 server, but most of it should apply to other distributions as well.

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