MANUAL 0 8

Introduction

The problem

Brute-force breakin attempts are quite frequent against SSH server. Automated scripts try multiple combination of username/password. To be continued...

The solution

Log files contain interesting information, especially about failed logins. These information can be used to ban an offensive host. This is exactly what Fail2ban does. It scans log files and detect patterns which correspond to possible breakin attempts and then execute actions. Most of the time, it consists of adding a new rule in a firewall chain.

The version 0.8 of Fail2ban introduces a lot of new features and improvements. Here is a list of the most important new features:

• client/server
• multithreaded
• Gamin support
• autodetection of the date/time format
• wildcard support in logpath option

The code has been completely rewritten since the last stable release. Support for more services (proftpd, sasl, qmail, apache, ssh, etc) and actions (iptables, tcp-wrapper, mail notification with whois information, etc) are now available.