So, noticed there were a lot of failed logins being reported by my security software. So, I thought I’d do some manual digging around as to what is going on my box. Here is what I did.

Scan the physical packets coming in/out of the box

tcpdump -i eth0 | grep -v rackspace | grep -v newrelic | grep -v 212.121.212.121

This above line gave me lots of output. I could see a lot of ip’s were hitting tcp port 80 a lot, and I wondered why. Obviously it was a bruteforce login attack.

When analysing attacks it’s important to consult the webserver logs for all access, if port 80 http is being used as a vector of attack it is therefore important to identify which addresses are hitting sensitive files, such as wp-logon.php , this is what I expect is being targeted, so I will target them a little;

cat /some/path/to/mywebwww/access.log | grep wp-login | grep Apr | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c

What this does is output the entire webserver access log and only show requests that have wp-login in. Then it removes all entries from Apr, and then it extracts only the IP addresses of those accessing it, and then sorts them uniquely but also -c counting them too, so we know exactly how many access requests have been made to this sensitive wp-logon.php file in just 1 month.
This will allow us to identify the clear attackers and block them.

Lets start blocking their access

iptables -I INPUT -s 1.1.1.1 -j DROP

The above line instructs the firewall to block the source ip 1.1.1.1 and DROP all packets coming in on the interface. Simple enough!

What I could do is take the line further, and find out exactly which networks these attacks are coming from by piping the ip addresses to whois. Lets do this now and extract some data we need to start making automated abuse reports with our script;

cat /somepath/www/access.log | grep wp-login | grep Apr | awk  '{print $1}' | sort | uniq | xargs -i echo "whois" {} | grep 'Organization\|AbuseEmail\|OrgAbusePhone'; echo;" > exec.sh;

 ./exec.sh

This is what the output looks like

Lets go one step further and refer to the {} output which has the initial IP argument. Then we’ll know which IP to email which abuse contact for when we pipe it to sendmail! ;D

cat /var/logs/access.log | grep wp-login | grep Apr | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq | xargs -i echo "echo {}" ";whois" {} "| grep 'OrgAbuseEmail';sleep 3;"

Output looks like

Sadly I run out of time with this.. but I will try and get the automatic abuse reporting finished soon 😀