Integrate fail2ban with WordPress: Spam Log Plugin

Spam Log is a WordPress plugin that writes a log entry for every comment marked as spam. The log file is suitable for processing by fail2ban.

Recently, I’ve encountered some very aggressive WordPress spam bots. These bots post a new spam comment almost every minute for hours on end. Needless to say my spam queue is a mess. I wrote the following plugin to solve this problem.

What is Spam Log?

Spam Log is a simple WordPress plugin that logs a message every time a comment is marked as spam. Each log message includes the IP address of the poster and the comment’s ID. The log can easily be processed by fail2ban. fail2ban is a daemon that scans log files for misbehaving clients and bans them by IP address. Here is sample output generated by Spam Log:

2009-04-20 04:15:03 comment id=527 from host= marked as spam
2009-04-20 04:18:15 comment id=528 from host= marked as spam
2009-04-20 04:20:36 comment id=529 from host= marked as spam
2009-04-20 04:21:46 comment id=530 from host= marked as spam
2009-04-20 04:22:49 comment id=531 from host= marked as spam

Why use Spam Log and fail2ban if Akismet/wp-recaptcha/etc. is already catching all the spam?

  • Many spammers post 50+ comments a day from a single IP address. Even if every comment is correctly marked as spam, the volume alone means that you can’t easily monitor the spam queue for false positives. Spam Log and fail2ban should considerably reduce the total amount of spam.
  • Even if spam comments never appear on your blog, they still waste valuable resources on your server. Low-memory virtual servers need all available resources for serving legitimate users. Banning spammers at the firewall before they ever connect to your web server is very efficient.


Spam Log

  1. Upload the spam-log folder to the wp-content/plugins directory.
  2. Active the plugin through the WordPress Admin menu.
  3. Set the location of the spam log through Spam Log’s Options page in the WordPress Admin menu. By default, the location is set to wp-content/spam.log. The file or containing directory needs to be writeable by the user that the web server runs as. On Debian or Ubuntu systems, you can do the following:

$ sudo touch /path/to/spam.log
$ sudo chown www-data.www-data /path/to/spam.log

fail2ban Configuration

Create /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/spam-log.conf with the following contents:

failregex = ^\s*comment id=\d+ from host=<HOST> marked as spam$
ignoreregex =

Add the following lines to /etc/fail2ban/jail.local:

enabled  = true
port     = http,https
filter   = spam-log
logpath  = /path/to/spam.log
maxretry = 5
findtime = 3600
bantime  = 86400

Change logpath to the path you set on Spam Log’s Options page. This configuration will ban an IP address for a day if it’s used to post 5 comments within an hour that are marked as spam. Warning: Some captcha plugins mark comments as spam when a user fails a captcha. Be careful decreasing maxretry if you’re using such a plugin as there’s a risk that you will ban legitimate users.



Log iptables Messages to a Separate File with rsyslog

Learn how to filter iptables log messages to a separate file. Two methods are presented: one using traditional syslog and one using rsyslog.

Firewall logging is very important, both to detect break-in attempts and to ensure that firewall rules are working properly. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to predict in advance which rules and what information should be logged. Consequently, it’s common practice to err on the side of verbosity. Given the amount of traffic that any machine connected to the Internet is exposed to, it’s critical that firewall logs be separated from normal logs in order to ease monitoring. What follows are two methods to accomplish this using iptables on Linux. The first method uses traditional syslog facility/priority filtering. The second, more robust method filters based on message content with rsyslog.

The Old Way: Use a Fixed Priority for iptables

The traditional UNIX syslog service only has two ways to categorize, and consequently route, messages: facility and priority. Facilities include kernel, mail, daemon, etc. Priorities include emergency, alert, warning, debug, etc. The Linux iptables firewall runs in the kernel and therefore always has the facility set to kern. Using traditional syslog software, the only way you can separate iptables messages from other kernel messages is to set the priority on all iptables messages to something specific that hopefully isn’t used for other kernel logging.

For example, you could add something like the following to /etc/syslog.conf:

kern.=debug -/var/log/iptables.log

and specifically remove the kernel debugging messages from all other logs like so:

kern.*;kern.!=debug -/var/log/kern.log

and in each iptables logging rule use the command line option --log-level debug.

There are two distinct disadvantages to this approach. First, there’s no guarantee that other kernel components won’t use the priority you’ve set iptables to log at. There’s a real possibility that useful messages will be lost in the deluge of firewall logging. Second, this approach prevents you from actually setting meaningful priorities in your firewall logs. You might not care about random machines hammering Windows networking ports, but you definitely want to know about malformed packets reaching your server.

The New Way: Filter Based on Message Content with rsyslog

rsyslog is mostly a drop-in replacement for a tradtional syslog daemon–on Linux, klogd and sysklogd. In fact, on Debian and Ubuntu, you can simply:

$ sudo apt-get install rsyslog

and if you haven’t customized /etc/syslog.conf, logging should continue to work in precisely the same way. rsyslog has been the default syslog on Red Hat/Fedora based systems for a number of versions now, but if it’s not installed:

$ sudo yum install rsyslog

Configure iptables to Use a Unique Prefix

We’ll setup rsyslog to filter based on the beginning of a message from iptables. So, for each logging rule in your firewall script, add --log-prefix "iptables: ". Most firewall builder applications can be easily configured to add a prefix to every logging rule. For example, if you’re using firehol as I am, you could add:


to /etc/firehol/firehol.conf.

Configure rsyslog to Filter Based on Prefix

Create /etc/rsyslog.d/iptables.conf with the following contents:

:msg, startswith, "iptables: " -/var/log/iptables.log
& ~

The first line means send all messages that start with “iptables: ” to /var/log/iptables.log. The second line means discard the messages that were matched in the previous line. The second line is of course optional, but it saves the trouble of explicitly filtering out firewall logs from subsequent syslog rules.

When I configured this on my own machines, I did notice one issue that may be a peculiarity of firehol, but it’s probably worth mentioning anyway. It seems that firehol adds an extra single quote at the beginning of log messages that needs to be matched in the rsyslog rule. For example, here’s a log message from firehol:

Apr 17 12:41:07 tick kernel: 'firehol: 'IN-internet':'IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=fe:fd:cf:c0:47:b5:00:0e:39:6f:48:00:08:00 SRC= DST= LEN=64 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=32 ID=5671 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=3549 DPT=5555 WINDOW=65535 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0

Notice the extra quote after “kernel: ” and before “firehol: “. So, on my machine I configured the rsyslog filter like so:

:msg, startswith, "'firehol: " -/var/log/iptables.log
& ~

Configure iptables Log Rotation

Finally, since we’re logging to a new file, it’s useful to create a log rotation rule. Create a file /etc/logrotate.d/iptables with the following contents:

	rotate 7
		invoke-rc.d rsyslog rotate > /dev/null

The preceding script tells logrotate to rotate the firewall log daily and keep logs from the past seven days.