crowdsec has always struck me as a really odd approach to security. You give out your logs to strangers and block IPs based on their say-so.
The cause and effect are so far removed that I can’t wrap my head about how it’s supposed to be efficient. It’s been proven in real-world tests that it lags badly behind the first waves of new vulnerabilities and by the time it starts blocking IPs that were related to those attacks the attackers have moved on and there are also patches available.
The “thousands of IPs blocked” image reminds me of that WWII airplane bullet-holes image.
You’re not wrong. If CrowdSec is your entire approach, it’s a little weird. But I use it as a (small) part of my overall blocking strategy. I use other lists and frankly, block most IPs by default. Those other IPs aren’t counted in the email screenshot though… only the CrowdSec based ones are coming through. I think a lot of the 137k above are just scanning bots to be frank.
I don’t believe there are any logs being transferred, just the abusive IPs are shared with the central DB.
So if an IP starts hitting a ton of rules (like .env access, repeated 403s, 404s, 429s, etc… Or specific AppSec rules) then that IP is blocked and sent to their central DB where it’s pushed out to everyone running crowdsec.
On my setup crowdsec has been more effective than cloudflare at stopping scanners and bots from overloading things, cloudflare just lets basically everything through so I stopped using it.
That said I’m curious if you remember the source of the real world tests, because I’d love to see what’s actually better.
Is there an alternative you suggest? I use Crowd-Sec in part because I don’t know of anything else that does the same job. That is, blocks malicious IPs without snooping on all traffic content (looking at you, Cloudflare).
If your services are private they should be behind access authorization or completely private access. Scanning should be a non-issue.
You can further mitigate scanning by getting wildcard certs, putting A/AAAA records on an obfuscated sub-domain rather than the base domain, and not using wildcard CNAME’s.
If they services are public you should be using a CDN anyway. If you don’t like the way Cloudflare does things they’re not the only CDN around, but some of the privacy issue is moot when running a public service.
crowdsec has always struck me as a really odd approach to security. You give out your logs to strangers and block IPs based on their say-so.
The cause and effect are so far removed that I can’t wrap my head about how it’s supposed to be efficient. It’s been proven in real-world tests that it lags badly behind the first waves of new vulnerabilities and by the time it starts blocking IPs that were related to those attacks the attackers have moved on and there are also patches available.
The “thousands of IPs blocked” image reminds me of that WWII airplane bullet-holes image.
You’re not wrong. If CrowdSec is your entire approach, it’s a little weird. But I use it as a (small) part of my overall blocking strategy. I use other lists and frankly, block most IPs by default. Those other IPs aren’t counted in the email screenshot though… only the CrowdSec based ones are coming through. I think a lot of the 137k above are just scanning bots to be frank.
I don’t believe there are any logs being transferred, just the abusive IPs are shared with the central DB.
So if an IP starts hitting a ton of rules (like .env access, repeated 403s, 404s, 429s, etc… Or specific AppSec rules) then that IP is blocked and sent to their central DB where it’s pushed out to everyone running crowdsec.
On my setup crowdsec has been more effective than cloudflare at stopping scanners and bots from overloading things, cloudflare just lets basically everything through so I stopped using it.
That said I’m curious if you remember the source of the real world tests, because I’d love to see what’s actually better.
Do you have a source on the real world tests?
Is there an alternative you suggest? I use Crowd-Sec in part because I don’t know of anything else that does the same job. That is, blocks malicious IPs without snooping on all traffic content (looking at you, Cloudflare).
If your services are private they should be behind access authorization or completely private access. Scanning should be a non-issue.
You can further mitigate scanning by getting wildcard certs, putting A/AAAA records on an obfuscated sub-domain rather than the base domain, and not using wildcard CNAME’s.
If they services are public you should be using a CDN anyway. If you don’t like the way Cloudflare does things they’re not the only CDN around, but some of the privacy issue is moot when running a public service.