After my 10-year-old basement Linux server died this week from a power outage, I took the sad step of giving up on it. It’s died before and I’ve patched it back together with a new power supply here or an addon PCI SATA card there, but I finally decided to throw in the towel since I had a newer old computer that had been idle for several years. The one that died was an Athlon K7 750 MHz with 512 MB ram. The new one is an Athlon 2 GHz (3200+) with 1 gig. For my uses, specs don’t really matter that much, but it’s nice to have more power for free.

I put CentOS 6 on it and configured Samba and copied all the data off the old machine and was back up and running within a few hours. Since I forward ports through my FiOS router to this box I did my standard lockdown procedure, including adding myself to the AllowUsers in sshd_config. Afterwards I took a look in /var/log/secure and saw the typical flood of dictionary attacks trying to get in as root or bob or tfeldman or jweisz. I have iptables configured to rate-limit SSH connections to 2 per 5 seconds per IP so the box doesn’t get DoSed out of existence, but some stuff does make it through to sshd.

Looking through /var/log/secure, I got to thinking it would be interesting if there was some way to visualize the attacks in a handy graph. Then I remembered, oh, wait, I can do that.

I wrote a perl script to parse out the attacks from /var/log/secure and insert them into a Postgres DB. This turned out to be pretty easy. Then I thought it would be more interesting to tie the IP of each attack to its originating country. I’ve used MaxMind’s GeoIP DB pretty extensively before, but I was looking something free. That’s when I remembered that MaxMind has a free GeoIP DB: GeoLiteCity. I grabbed it and yum-installed the Perl lib and added the geo data to the attack DB. Rather than worry about normalizing the schema I just shoved the info into the same table. Life is easier this way, and it’s just a for-fun project.

So I got that all working and parsed it against the existing /var/log/secures via

[root@lunix2011 ~]# zcat /var/log/secure-20111117.gz | perl parse-secure.pl

I wrote ssh.php to see what’s in the table:

ssh.php list of hacking attempts

So now that the data was all in place, time to move on to the graphs, which is what I really wanted to do. Last time I wanted to graph data programmatically I used JPGraph, which does everything in PHP and is super versatile. But I wanted something… cooler. Maybe something interactive. A little Googling turned up Highcharts which is absolutely awesome, and does everything in JavaScript. I basically modified some of their example charts and pumped my data into them and got the charts below.

Pie chart of attacks grouped by country for the past 30 days:

Pie chart by country

Bar graph of attacks per day:

Bar graph of daily attacks

So, that’s that. Code is in github if anyone wants to play around with it. I’ve cronned parse-secure.pl to run every 5 minutes so the data gets updated automatically.

I had to give up on PHP and go to Perl, but it turned out not to be so bad. Users can now change their Active Directory passwords via a self-service web page that doesn’t require admin credentials. The Perl code is below.  Authentication to the script is done via .htaccess LDAP authentication, so the REMOTE_USER env variable is assumed to contain the user’s username (sAMAccountName) by the time this script is called.  There is a simple check for $ENV{HTTPS} to ensure the script is called via SSL, and AD requires password changes to be done via ldaps, so the whole thing should be encrypted end to end.

(Edited 5/14/2010 to replace the inlined Perl script with a link to the script as a text file.)

(Edited 10/6/2011 to replace link to script with link to gist)