Last updated on May 26th, 2022 at 08:07 pm

In this tutorial, you will learn about how to protect WordPress against brute force attacks using Fail2ban. Fail2ban is a python based intrusion prevention tool that;

monitors log files (e.g. /var/log/auth.log,/var/log/apache/access.log) and temporarily or persistently bans failure-prone addresses by updating existing firewall rules. Fail2ban allows easy specification of different actions to be taken such as to ban an IP using iptables or hostsdeny rules, or simply to send a notification email.

By default, it comes with filter expressions for various services (sshd, apache, proftpd, sasl, etc.) but configuration can be easily extended for monitoring any other text file. All filters and actions are given in the config files, thus fail2ban can be adopted to be used with a variety of files and firewalls. Following recommends are listed:

• iptables/nftables — default installation uses iptables for banning. nftables is also supported. You most probably need it
• whois — used by a number of mail-whois actions to send notification emails with whois information about attacker hosts. Unless you will use those you don’t need whois
• python3-pyinotify — unless you monitor services logs via systemd, you need pyinotify for efficient monitoring for log files changes.

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Protect WordPress Against Brute force Attacks Using Fail2ban

As much as there are multiple ways of protecting WordPress logins against brute force attacks such as Restricting Access to WordPress Login Page to Specific IPs with libModSecurity, this guide will focus on the use of Fail2ban for that purpose.

Installing Fail2ban

To begin with, install Fail2ban on your host system. Installation of Fail2ban varies from one Linux distribution to the other.

If you are on an Ubuntu/Debian system, simply run the command below to install Fail2ban;

apt update

apt install fail2ban

On CentOS and similar distros, run the commands below to install Fail2ban;

dnf install epel-release

dnf update

dnf install fail2ban

Configure Fail2ban to Protect WordPress Authentications against Brute force attacks

First off, you need to know that Fail2ban monitors log files (e.g. /var/log/auth.log,/var/log/apache/access.log) and temporarily or persistently bans failure-prone addresses by updating existing firewall rules. Fail2ban allows easy specification of different actions to be taken such as to ban an IP using iptables or hostsdeny rules…

To effectively ban or block offending IP addresses, Fail2ban uses jails which is basically a combination of various filters and actions. Fail2ban filters are just but regular that matches a specific pattern in the respective log file being monitored. The can pattern can correspond to a failed login attempt, request status code, request URI or any other suspicious activity. Fail2ban actions on the other hand define commands that are executed when the filter matches a specified pattern such as suspicious IP address.

Create Fail2ban WordPress Jail

Fail2ban has four configuration file types:

• fail2ban.conf: Fail2Ban global configuration (such as logging)
• filter.d/*.conf: Filters specifying how to detect authentication failures
• action.d/*.conf: Actions defining the commands for banning and unbanning of IP address
• jail.conf: Jails defining combinations of Filters with Actions.

Note: It is recommended that *.conf files should remain unchanged to ease upgrades. If needed, customizations should be provided in *.local files.

Copy the jail.conf file to jail.local file;

cp /etc/fail2ban/jail.{conf,local}

Next, edit the jail.local file and set the default parameters under the [DEFAULT] section.

vim /etc/fail2ban/jail.local

Some of the parameters we will adjust include;

• ignoreip: specifies IP addresses or hostnames to ignore.
• bantime: defines the duration in seconds of how long a host is banned. The default is 600 seconds (10 minutes).
• maxretry: defines the number of failures before a is banned.
• findtime: defines a time period within which if a host exceeds the maxretry value, it is banned.

...
ignoreip = 127.0.0.1/8 192.168.57.33
...
bantime  = 3600
...
findtime  = 60
...
maxretry = 3

This basically means, if there will be any suspicious activity like more than 3 failed logins within a duration of one minute, the suspicious host, except localhost and 192.168.57.33, will be banned for one hour.

Once you have defined the default options above, create a jail for wordpress. For example, paste the content below at the bottom of the jail.local file above;

...
# WordPress Jail
[wordpress-auths]
enabled = true
port = http,https
filter = wordpress-auth
logpath = /var/log/apache2/wp.access.log

You can adjust all these settings to meet your needs!!

Most options above are self explanatory. The filter specifies the name of the filter that we will create to filter the logs that identifies the WordPress logins logs in the log file defined by the logpath.

Save and exit the file.

Create Fail2ban WordPress Login Filter

Next you need to create a filter to define a regular expression that filters out the WordPress authentication logs from the specified log file.

Note that, in our case, we use the log file, /var/log/apache2/wp.access.log.

For every WordPress login attempt, a POST request is sent to /wp-login.php file with 200 status code and is written to the Web server access log. Below are the sample logs for our logins;

tail -f /var/log/apache2/wp.access.log | grep "POST /wp-login.php"

192.168.57.33 - - [11/Mar/2021:20:18:15 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2825 "http://kifarunix-demo.com/wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"
192.168.57.1 - - [11/Mar/2021:20:19:14 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2815 "http://kifarunix-demo.com/wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.72 Safari/537.36"

So while creating our filter, we will use a regex that filters out such kind of log lines from the log file.

Multiple Fail2ban filters are located under, /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/. You can check any of them on how filters can be created.

Create a WordPress authentication filter. Pay attention the name of the filter configuration file

vim /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/wordpress-auth.conf

[Definition]
failregex = ^<HOST> .* "POST /wp-login.php HTTP.* 200

That is a sample failregex for our WordPress logins.

Save and exit. You can add more filters that suits your needs.

Test Fail2ban WordPress Filter

To verify if your filter can match the pattern in the log files, use fail2ban-regex tool as follows.

Command synopsis.

fail2ban-regex [OPTIONS] <LOG> <REGEX> [IGNOREREGEX]

So to test our WordPress filter;

fail2ban-regex /var/log/apache2/wp.access.log /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/wordpress-auth.conf

Sample output showing matched lines;

Running tests
=============

Use   failregex filter file : wordpress-auth, basedir: /etc/fail2ban
Use         log file : /var/log/apache2/wp.access.log
Use         encoding : UTF-8


Results
=======

Failregex: 10 total
|-  #) [# of hits] regular expression
|   1) [10] ^<HOST> .* "POST /wp-login.php HTTP.* 200
`-

Ignoreregex: 0 total

Date template hits:
|- [# of hits] date format
|  [577] Day(?P<_sep>[-/])MON(?P=_sep)ExYear[ :]?24hour:Minute:Second(?:\.Microseconds)?(?: Zone offset)?
`-

Lines: 577 lines, 0 ignored, 10 matched, 567 missed
[processed in 0.25 sec]

Missed line(s): too many to print.  Use --print-all-missed to print all 567 lines

That confirms that the filter works fine.

Running Fail2ban

Restart Fail2ban service. Note that is started and enabled to run on system boot upon installation.

systemctl restart fail2ban

Checking the status;

systemctl status fail2ban

● fail2ban.service - Fail2Ban Service
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/fail2ban.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Thu 2021-03-11 20:43:32 UTC; 44s ago
       Docs: man:fail2ban(1)
    Process: 5484 ExecStartPre=/bin/mkdir -p /run/fail2ban (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 5486 (f2b/server)
      Tasks: 7 (limit: 2282)
     Memory: 11.8M
     CGroup: /system.slice/fail2ban.service
             └─5486 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/fail2ban-server -xf start

Mar 11 20:43:32 ubuntu20 systemd[1]: Starting Fail2Ban Service...
Mar 11 20:43:32 ubuntu20 systemd[1]: Started Fail2Ban Service.
Mar 11 20:43:33 ubuntu20 fail2ban-server[5486]: Server ready

Check Enabled Fail2ban Jails

Check the enabled jails using fail2ban-client status command.

fail2ban-client status

Status
|- Number of jail:	2
`- Jail list:	sshd, wordpress-auths

Verifying WordPress authentication Protection

You can simulate events of the multiple failed authentications to WordPress to check if any banning can happen.

While tailing the logs and running failed login test;

tail -f /var/log/apache2/wp.access.log | grep "POST /wp-login.php"

192.168.57.1 - - [11/Mar/2021:20:47:59 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2825 "http://kifarunix-demo.com/wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.72 Safari/537.36"
192.168.57.1 - - [11/Mar/2021:20:48:02 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2814 "http://kifarunix-demo.com/wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.72 Safari/537.36"
192.168.57.1 - - [11/Mar/2021:20:48:04 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2825 "http://kifarunix-demo.com/wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.72 Safari/537.36"

After the third failed login, my IP is blocked and get such error on browser;

Checking Status of Fail2ban Banned IP

To check the status of the banned IPs, use fail2ban-client command;

fail2ban-client status wordpress-auths

Status for the jail: wordpress-auths
|- Filter
|  |- Currently failed:	0
|  |- Total failed:	3
|  `- File list:	/var/log/apache2/wp.access.log
`- Actions
   |- Currently banned:	1
   |- Total banned:	1
   `- Banned IP list:	192.168.57.10

You can obtain a list of jails using fail2ban-client status command.

Checking Iptables;

iptables -L -nv

...
Chain f2b-wordpress-auths (1 references)
 pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination         
   21  9078 REJECT     all  --  *      *       192.168.57.1         0.0.0.0/0            reject-with icmp-port-unreachable
    0     0 RETURN     all  --  *      *       0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0

Unbanning Fail2ban Banned IP

If you want to unban an IP, run the command;

fail2ban-client set <jail> unbanip <IP>

fail2ban-client set wordpress-auths unbanip 192.168.57.1

There is more about Fail2ban. But that marks the end of our tutorial on how to protect WordPress against brute force attacks using Fail2ban.

Further Reading

Fail2ban Manual

Other Tutorials

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