RoundCube login attack prevention with Fail2ban

I’ve noticed a little spate of password attack attempts via Roundcube – a webmail program we use for mail over at https://mail.computersolutions.cn

Roundcube does have captcha plugins available which will mitigate this, but users will complain if they have to type in a captcha to login for mail.

Fail2ban provides an easy solution for this.

Roundcube stores its logs in a logs/errors file.

If I take a look at a sample login failure, it looks something like the example below

[09-Jun-2014 13:43:38 +0800]: IMAP Error: Login failed for admin from 105.236.42.200. Authentication failed. in rcube_imap.php on line 184 (POST /?_task=login&_action=login)

We should be able to use a regex like:
IMAP Error: Login failed for .* from

However fail2ban’s host regex then includes a trailing ., and fail2ban doesn’t recognise the ip.
I eventually came up with the overly complicated regex below, which seems to work:

IMAP Error: Login failed for .* from <HOST>(\. .* in .*?/rcube_imap\.php on line \d+ \(\S+ \S+\))?$

Lets add detection for that into fail2ban.
First up, we need to add roundcube into /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf

[roundcube]
enabled  = false
port     = http,https
filter   = roundcube
action   = iptables-multiport[name=roundcube, port="http,https"]
logpath  = [YOUR PATH TO ROUNDCUBE HERE]/logs/errors
maxretry = 5
findtime = 600
bantime = 3600

Note that we are not enabling the filter yet.

Change [YOUR PATH TO ROUNDCUBE HERE] in the above to your actual roundcube folder
eg /home/roundcube/public_html/logs/errors

Next, we need to create a filter.

Add /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/roundcube.conf

[Definition]
failregex = IMAP Error: Login failed for .* from <HOST>(\. .* in .*?/rcube_imap\.php on line \d+ \(\S+ \S+\))?$

ignoreregex =

Now we have the basics in place, we need to test out our filter.
For that, we use fail2ban-regex.
This accepts 2 (or more) arguments.

fail2ban-regex LOGFILE  FILTER 

For our purposes, we’ll pass it our logfile, and the filter we want to test with.

eg

fail2ban-regex  /home/roundcube/public_html/logs/errors /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/roundcube.conf  |more

If you’ve passed your log file, and it contains hits, you should see something like this:

Running tests
=============

Use regex file : /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/roundcube.conf
Use log file   : /home/www/webmail/public_html/logs/errors


Results
=======

Failregex
|- Regular expressions:
|  [1] IMAP Error: Login failed for .* from <HOST>(\. .* in .*?/rcube_imap\.php on line \d+ \(\S+ \S+\))?$
|
`- Number of matches:
   [1] 14310 match(es)

Ignoreregex
|- Regular expressions:
|
`- Number of matches:

Summary
=======

Addresses found:
[1]
    61.170.8.8 (Thu Dec 06 13:10:03 2012)
    ...[14309 more results in our logs!]

If you see hits, great, that means our regex worked, and you have some failed logins in the logs.
If you don’t get any results, check your log (use grep) and see if the log warning has changed. The regex I’ve posted works for roundcube 0.84

Once you’re happy, edit jail.conf, enable the plugin.
(set enabled = true), and restart fail2ban with

service fail2ban restart