Shifting the SSH listening port to non-22 and enabling fail2ban filters are solid steps toward hardening your server environment. Let’s take it a step further and leverage the power of the iptables firewall.
The following is a basic configuration for web, email, and SSH traffic.
Allow already established connections on all available interfaces, in this case eth0 and eth1:
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Allow TCP connection attempts for SSH, replace
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Allow HTTP and HTTPS:
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Allow SMTP and IMAP, ports 25 and 993 respectively:
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Change the default policy for the INPUT chain to DROP all, i.e. drop all connections and only allowed traffic for the policies that match the above. *Only implement this once you have confirmed you can maintain access to the server over SSH:
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Save your new ruleset, for Debian:
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Your configuration should look something like this:
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Edit: Feb 3, 2014
I’ve posted part two of this ever-evolving series of security-related posts–whitelisting ICMP traffic.