Effective Protection Against SSH Brute Force Attacks Using Fail2Ban

Since 2005 there has been an immense increase in brute force SSH attacks and though Linux is pretty secure by default, it does not stop evil programs from indefinitely trying to login with different passwords. Having good firewalls is one step to help protect your Linux box. Getting the right Iptables is not always easy. The Linux user can certainly manually add Iptable rules to there firewall but is there a better way? One piece of software that can help automate part of creating firewall rules is called Fail2Ban. Do you have any favorites or a review on Fail2ban?

Without proper protection your server is a sitting duck waiting for a bot to guess the right combination and hit the jackpot. But with just 2 commands we can stop that.

Iptables is the standard Linux firewall and though I use Ubuntu, it should be installed by default on any modern distribution. But it doesn't do anything yet. It's just sitting there, so we need to teach it some rules to prevent brute force attacks.

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