As a long time Apache user I've never understood using its proxy modules for stuff like this. I've always felt like its much cleaner to just use a small daemon process built solely for the task of reverse proxy or balancing. e.g. haproxy, pound, etc.
How my Apache server became a malicious free internet proxy
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: How my Apache server became a malicious free internet proxy
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup install something like fail2ban & setup email alerts. You'll get a new notice every 5 minutes or so for the first month from all the china based bots trying to login via common ssh credentials.
I run snort and from its alerts, the bots come from all around the world not all from CN. Though the CN sources are largest.
I was rather surprised when I had a week where most of the attacks came from Las Vegas and New Hampshire.
Re: How my Apache server became a malicious free internet proxy
#33Honest question from a developer perspective: Why there isn't any "best practice/hardened by default" wizard-style configuration, something people can do right after they install their OS? E.g.: Welcome to Best Practice Linux. Click Next to continue. Which http server you want (httpd/lightttpd/...). Click Next to continue. (you get the idea). Something like apt-get but with best-practice defaults.
This would be a really really good idea.
However, in my experience (as an Apache noob), the Apache community consists of experts who are so far ahead of the noobs that they can't see the issue from the perspective of noobs.
When I configured my first web box, I couldn't believe that in 2 days it was hacked open and taken over (by some hackers in China apparently -- those guys are scary good). My host (DO) couldn't provide any advice / support on what exactly had happened. I reset everything and set it up again, and again, 2 days later, the box was completely taken over (again by peeps in cn).
Finally, I did a couple of tiny tweaks in how I logged in (I disabled root login, and configured SSH keys to log-in, and changed the log-in port), and I was never hacked again. If these 3 little tweaks could be made defaults, there'd be a whole lot less hacking going on.
Re: How my Apache server became a malicious free internet proxy
#34"How my Apache server became a malicious free internet proxy" tl;dr: Negligence, and failing to RTFM. What really horrifies me is the author doesn't seem to understand the magnitude of their error. The final quip at the end illustrates this. "Ha! someone searched manslaughter over my proxy! I had a lot of fun reading my open proxy logs..." I wonder how many stolen credit card transactions were done over his proxy, ca…
I've had similar issues with an open source project in which a simple proxy was established with FiddlerCore to tap traffic to a web browser, pretty tame stuff and nothing malicious.
Problem is that by default it was configured to listen on 0.0.0.0:80, making it an open HTTP proxy that everybody on the same LAN could connect to. The only real threat so far is that somebody could send in a large volume of traffic to crash the proxy, but wait and behold....
...some users were running it from hosts that are either a) directly connected to the public IP space without a firewall and b) behind NAT, but with lazy DMZ/port forwarding configuration that exposes their port 80 to the internet anyway. For about a year people have been obliviously hosting open HTTP proxies from home.
Eventually somebody found out and it took another couple of months of back and forth issue reporting and PR tugging battles to get it properly patched. Opsec is hard.
Re: How my Apache server became a malicious free internet proxy
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ran a machine in a colo for almost four years, public facing web server for a dedicated webapp. I managed to escape any attacks or infections, but I'm positive it was 80% of what I did and 20% that it's a low volume app that never got attention by malicious actors. And I've been in the industry for a long time, not a noob.
Everything is attacked. It's all automated, not personal.
Well, true, we did get spam attacks on the app, so I wound up banning huge swaths of the world. I moved SSH to a very high port, only ran apache, sshd, and an SMTP agent (the machine never received email, inbound was handled by GMail). Still, had someone wanted to exploit the PHP app, I'd be surprised if they couldn't find a weakness. It was custom written, but nearly a decade age.
Re: How my Apache server became a malicious free internet proxy
#36"How my Apache server became a malicious free internet proxy" tl;dr: Negligence, and failing to RTFM. What really horrifies me is the author doesn't seem to understand the magnitude of their error. The final quip at the end illustrates this. "Ha! someone searched manslaughter over my proxy! I had a lot of fun reading my open proxy logs..." I wonder how many stolen credit card transactions were done over his proxy, ca…
Bonus TL;DR: By setting "ProxyRequests On", which is only required to use Apache as a forward web proxy. (There's even a big red warning in the documentation about this!)
Re: How my Apache server became a malicious free internet proxy
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything is attacked. It's all automated, not personal.
Well, true, we did get spam attacks on the app, so I wound up banning huge swaths of the world. I moved SSH to a very high port, only ran apache, sshd, and an SMTP agent (the machine never received email, inbound was handled by GMail). Still, had someone wanted to exploit the PHP app, I'd be surprised if they couldn't find a weakness. It was custom written, but nearly a decade age.
Elite attackers can compromise almost any target, but even they won't bother finding one-off vulnerabilities when the goal is botnet host acquisition. For that only widely deployed vulnerabilities are worth exploiting.
In practice that means you can get away with something as crazy as opening up a password-free root shell on some random high port, but you can't get away with weak SSH logins or unpatched Wordpress sites.
Re: How my Apache server became a malicious free internet proxy
#38This is a perfect example of why most people should not run their own hardware. Don't get me wrong its really fun to build and configure your own server and I openly encourage people to learn but I also remind them that its extremely difficult (for a novice) to do securely. Additionally connecting a misconfigured server to the internet doesn't just hurt the server owner but the entire network is affected, as you are…
I was going to say the opposite. It's awesome that we can spin up boxes and host our own servers, and on top of that, learn from our mistakes. I doubt there's a person here who's never been host to malware, spam or some other malady as a result of some of the experimentation they've done as they learned more about computer systems.
This is exactly my point. One of the major reasons that malware and malicious actors have been able to do as much as they have is because of the large number of misconfigured devices on the internet.
The internet has evolved beyond a network cobbled together by a bunch of academics and engineers -- its a critical piece of infrastructure.
Re: How my Apache server became a malicious free internet proxy
#39So you got to the end solution of... uninstalling fail2ban to fix it? You didn't bother to check WHY it was maxing out the cpu? Glad you got the issue resolved though and didn't fork over the $10 because you would've just run into the same issue in the future if you didn't get to the root cause of it (misconfigured Apache).
At this point fail2ban wasn't really needed anymore since the author installed it to stop the people using the server as an open proxy. After they solved the proxy issue fail2ban was just causing problems and wasn't needed.
I understand it wasn't needed after the fact. But the entire point of the original post/resolution was to understand what was causing the problem (page time outs) - yet when faced with a second problem, he chose the 'easy' route of just uninstalling it (unalike his resilience to pay for his IP change or wiping the server).
Re: How my Apache server became a malicious free internet proxy
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was going to say the opposite. It's awesome that we can spin up boxes and host our own servers, and on top of that, learn from our mistakes. I doubt there's a person here who's never been host to malware, spam or some other malady as a result of some of the experimentation they've done as they learned more about computer systems.
This is exactly my point. One of the major reasons that malware and malicious actors have been able to do as much as they have is because of the large number of misconfigured devices on the internet. The internet has evolved beyond a network cobbled together by a bunch of academics and engineers -- its a critical piece of infrastructure.
Seems like the problem is vulnerable by default options in software, not experimenting with it. More people have hosted malware by just running Windows than anyone has by experimenting with Apache, then fixing it and learning something useful that can now help other newbies.