Securing Mikrotik Routers: IP Blocklists

If you’re only interested in the blocklist, skip to it, here. Mikrotik Mikrotik is a manufacturer of low cost and full featured routers and networking equipment. Routers built by Mikrotik run RouterOS, a customized Linux distribution and RouterOS utilizes iptables for filtering, shaping, and routing traffic and as such the interface is familiar to any seasoned Linux veteran. Securing the Network Unfortunately, since RouterOS is using iptables under the hood it lacks a good number of features that are found in modern next-generation firewalls (NGFW). Continue reading

I Was DDoS'd This Week, How I Used ASN Blocking to Resolve The Problem

The Alerts “Why do things always have to happen on a Friday?”, was the question I asked myself at 5:04 when I read the Grafana alert delivered to my phone. I had just booted up my gaming PC and I was going to get started on an early weekend gaming session when my phone began buzzing and the notifications began piling up. Bereft of hundreds of frames per second for the moment I logged in to my dashboard to see what was wrong. Continue reading

Securing NGINX With HTTPS and LetsEncrypt

Encryption has become increasingly important over the last several years, you would be hard pressed to find a site on the internet today that isn’t protected by HTTPS encryption. Some of the benefits of running HTTPS include: Higher Search Result Rankings Search engines favour HTTPS sites and will rank them higher. HTTPS is an important part of search engine optimization. Improved Security Since connections are encrypted, they are technically impossible to view in transit. Continue reading