For those of you in the hosting business, or if you’re hosting your own servers and exposing them to the Internet, securing your systems against attackers must be a high priority.
mod_security (open-source intrusion detection and prevention engine for web applications that integrates seamlessly with the webserver) and mod_evasive are two very important tools that can be used to protect a web server against brute force or (D)DoS attacks.
Related Article: How to Install Linux Malware Detect with ClamAV as Antivirus Engine
mod_evasive, as its name suggests, provides evasive capabilities while under attack, acting as an umbrella that shields web servers from such threats.
Install Mod_Security and Mod_Evasive to Protect Apache
In this article, we will discuss how to install, configure, and put them into play along with Apache on RHEL/CentOS 8 and 7 as well as Fedora. In addition, we will simulate attacks in order to verify that the server reacts accordingly.
This assumes that you have a LAMP server installed on your system. If not, please check this article before proceeding further.
You will also need to set up iptables as the default firewall front-end instead of firewalld if you’re running RHEL/CentOS 8/7 or Fedora. We do this in order to use the same tool in both RHEL/CentOS 8/7 and Fedora.
Step 1: Installing the Iptables Firewall on RHEL/CentOS 8/7 and Fedora
To begin, stop and disable firewalld:
## systemctl stop firewalld
## systemctl disable firewalld
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