Introduction
WordPress is a very robust content-management system (CMS) that is free and open source. Because anyone can comment, create an account, and post on WordPress, many malicious actors have created networks of bots and servers that compromise and spam WordPress sites through brute-force attacks. The tool Fail2ban is useful in preventing unauthorized access to both your Droplet and your WordPress site. It notes suspicious or repeated login failures and proactively bans those IPs by modifying firewall rules for your Droplet.
In this guide, we will be using version 0.9.3 of Fail2ban on an Ubuntu 14.04 LAMP server, and integrating it with WordPress by using a spam log plugin.
Prerequisites
To complete this guide, you need
- One Ubuntu 14.04 Droplet using the one-click WordPress instance or your own WordPress Droplet
- A non-root user configured with sudo privileges for administrative tasks. You can learn how to set this up by following our Ubuntu 14.04 initial server setup guide.
- Set up and configure Fail2ban by following this How To Install and Use Fail2ban on Ubuntu 14.04 tutorial.
- Follow the guide on How To Configure Secure Updates and Installations in WordPress on Ubuntu
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