Fail2Ban + CloudFlare
2019, May 30
When protecting a server fail2ban is a great tool for the job. It reads log files and bans IPs that show signs of malicious activity. There is a lot of support for and it can integrate well with other applications.
How I Use it
I use CloudFlare on all my sites. This means that when you connect to any of my sites, you connect to cloudflare then CloudFlare connects to my site. Because of this, I have an rule in nginx (which I added a the bottom) that blocks any connections that attempt to connect directly to my server. I decided to increase the protection that I had on my server by creating a filter in fail2ban. I made it so connections are blocked for 5 minutes if the connection is made from an IP that is not from CloudFlare.
Fail2ban filter configuration and instructions here
Nginx Rule
#Allow Cloudflare IPs
#Retrived from https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/
allow 173.245.48.0/20;
allow 103.21.244.0/22;
allow 103.22.200.0/22;
allow 103.31.4.0/22;
allow 141.101.64.0/18;
allow 108.162.192.0/18;
allow 190.93.240.0/20;
allow 188.114.96.0/20;
allow 197.234.240.0/22;
allow 198.41.128.0/17;
allow 162.158.0.0/15;
allow 104.16.0.0/12;
allow 172.64.0.0/13;
allow 131.0.72.0/22;
allow 2400:cb00::/32;
allow 2606:4700::/32;
allow 2803:f800::/32;
allow 2405:b500::/32;
allow 2405:8100::/32;
allow 2a06:98c0::/29;
allow 2c0f:f248::/32;
#Block all other IPs from connecting
deny all;