Blog

How to Add Protective Measures Against SSH Attacks

Posted by Jeff H. on January 28, 2010

Earlier this week, I noted that ssh brute force attacks are on the rise. These attacks attempt to guess SSH passwords by repeatedly accessing your server. Often these attacks can disrupt SSH services. As I noted yesterday, you can use IPtables to rate-limit or throttle ssh connections. Today, I want to expand on that protection by adding some more security to SSH directly.

How to Block SSH Brute Force Attacks

Posted by Jeff H. on January 27, 2010

As I mentioned in an earlier post, ssh attacks are on the rise. If research solutions on combating these attacks, you will often find a long list of tools, most of which are log analyzers that block IPs that repeatedly fail authentication. Popular tools such as fail2ban, denyhosts, and others are subject to attack because they fail to verify log data, so a better method is needed. Fortunately, you have one right there on your server: IPtables.

Rise in SSH Brute Force Attacks

Posted by Jeff H. on January 22, 2010

Recently, we've seen a rise in SSH brute force attacks. This has been causing some outages on SSH as the service overloads and cannot handle any more requests. While there are many tips on the internet on how to block this, some of the more popular ones have denial of service exploits. Currently, we are testing a PAM module for automatically blacklisting abusive hosts.

How To Adhere to the CAN SPAM Act

Posted by Jeff H. on December 10, 2009

We monitor our networks closely for spam related complaints by participating in various ISP's postmaster feedback programs. We see complaints almost every day. Mostly, these complaints are just people forgetting the opted-in to a email, but more importantly, many senders are violating the CAN-SPAM Act guidelines. If you send our bulk emails, even at low volumes, you will want to assure that you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

Phishers Targeting Webmasters using cPanel

Posted by Jeff H. on December 07, 2009

Scam artists have launched a massive email campaign targeting cPanel web administrators. Using phishing techniques, they are trying to trick webmasters into giving up access credentials.