Visualising SSH attacks with R
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If you have any machine with an SSH server open to the world and you take a look at your logs, you may be alarmed to see so many login attempts from so many unknown IP addresses. DenyHosts is a pretty neat service for Unix-based systems which works in the background reviewing such logs and appending the offending addresses into the hosts.deny
file, thus avoiding brute-force attacks.
The following R snippet may be useful to quickly visualise a hosts.deny
file with logs from DenyHosts. Such file may have comments (lines starting with #
), and actual records are stored in the form <service>: <IP>
. Therefore, read.table
is more than enough to load it into R. The rgeolocate
package is used to geolocate the IPs, and the counts per country are represented in a world map using rworldmap
:
library(dplyr) library(rgeolocate) library(rworldmap) hosts.deny <- "/etc/hosts.deny" db <- system.file("extdata", "GeoLite2-Country.mmdb", package="rgeolocate") read.table(hosts.deny, col.names=c("service", "IP")) %>% pull(IP) %>% maxmind(db, fields="country_code") %>% count(country_code) %>% as.data.frame() %>% joinCountryData2Map(joinCode="ISO2", nameJoinColumn="country_code") %>% mapCountryData(nameColumnToPlot="n", catMethod="pretty", mapTitle="Attacks per country") ## 74 codes from your data successfully matched countries in the map ## 2 codes from your data failed to match with a country code in the map ## 168 codes from the map weren't represented in your data
Then, you may consider more specific access restrictions based on IP prefixes…
Article originally published in Enchufa2.es: Visualising SSH attacks with R.R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
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