Secure Your Server with Denyhosts

[ Thanks to GeekRide for this link. ]

"SSH (Secure Shell) is one of the very common ways which is used to login to your machine and perform some tasks and which simply means that this is one of the gateway between hackers/crackers and your system. So, most of the people would try different cracking techniques like Brute force or Dictionary attacks to gain access to your system with this service.

"DenyHosts is a tool i use to secure my SSH server from these type of people. Written in python, this tool serves as a very active security guard and helps me to keep my system safe from lots of prying eyes. Every day, I usually found at least couple of entries in the /etc/hosts.deny file. If you believe that your system operates on DHCP or no one could know your IP address, hence can’t launch any attack against your system, then this is the time to wake up. Hackers have their scripts which don’t target a specific hosts or machine, they usually picks a network block and launches random attacks on all the machines available in that block and those scripts informs them as soon as they find something which could be of any interest to the hacker. So which means that your machine is equally vulnerable to these attacks as much is mine."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Build a Linux firewall, that will only be opened when you needed it to be(Mar 31, 2009)
• Hardening the Linux server(Jan 11, 2009)
• SSH: Best Practices(Jan 18, 2008)
• Preventing Brute Force Attacks With Fail2ban On OpenSUSE 10.3(Oct 17, 2007)
• Securing SSH Using Denyhosts(Aug 28, 2007)