CentOS 7.x fail2ban

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Revision as of 08:16, 17 October 2018 by Saurabh (talk | contribs)

<yambe:breadcrumb>CentOS_7.x_Security_Tools|CentOS 7.x Security Tools</yambe:breadcrumb>

CentOS 7.x fail2ban

To configure fail2ban on CentOS 7.x use:

  1. Install fail2ban using
    yum -y install epel-release
    yum -y install fail2ban
  2. Create a local copy of configuration files for local modifications. We should not modify .conf files directly as they would get overwritten during package upgrades
    cp /etc/fail2ban/fail2ban.conf /etc/fail2ban/fail2ban.local
    cp /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf /etc/fail2ban/jail.local
  3. Edit /etc/fail2ban/jail.local to set backend to systemd and to also enable jail for sshd
    ...
    backend=systemd
    ...
    [sshd]
    enabled = true
    ...
  4. Start and enable fail2ban on system boot
    systemctl start fail2ban
    systemctl enable fail2ban
  5. Ensure that firewalld is enabled as that is required by fail2ban using CentOS 7.x Basic firewalld configuration
  6. Verify that fail2ban is running with at least 1 jail and that jail has one or more blocked IPs
    fail2ban-client status
    fail2ban-client status sshd


There is also older article on fail2ban at Fail2ban


In case of email server using postfix and dovecot add

   enabled=true

under dovecot and posfix-sasl also. This would then create three jails including sshd.


Refer: