Block malicious traffic with fail2ban
There are many ways in which you can protect your VPS – from strict password policies, through to aggressive spam filtering, basic firewall configurations and antivirus. However, no matter how fancy and elaborate your security precautions are, there will always be someone ready to launch dictionary attacks and probe for vulnerable scripts on your poor server.
Even though we preconfigure strict firewall policies on our fully managed Cloud VPS, there are some services – like the web server itself – that have to remain wide open to the world. Without those gates, there would be no mail flow or web browsing.
Consequently your Cloud VPS can be kept quite busy just fighting off failed FTP/S password probes along with the load of “404 not found” reports in your apache error logs from bots searching for common software exploits. Not to mention the wealth of failed IMAP, SMTP and POP3 connections from spammers and identity thieves trying to compromise your mailbox.
If you weren’t really careful about keeping your website software 100% up to date you have, probably, at some point, received a support ticket from our abuse department notifying you that your VPS has unfortunately become a spam crib due to malware injections or a simple password breach.
A few months ago Parallels (now Odin) introduced new security enhancements to Plesk 12. Such features as WordPress Toolkit, mobile manager application, antispam and antivirus capabilities; the platform is a great choice for any web administrator. One little gem, in terms of security, was the addition of Fail2Ban. Let’s take a look at how it works and how it can save your server from compromise.