Question

Wordpress Droplet 20.04 issue with fail2ban plugin obsolete filters

Hi I am using the wordpress droplet on ubuntu 20.04.The Wp-fail2ban plugin updated to version 5.0 and I get issues about obsolete filters

  • wordpress-hard.conf is obsolete (version 4.4.0.8).

  • wordpress-soft.conf is obsolete (version 4.4.0.4).

  • wordpress-extra.conf is obsolete (version 4.4.0.4). You should update your fail2ban filters as soon as possible.

How can I update?


Submit an answer
Answer a question...

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

I found the answer: To update the filters you have to download them from the plugins.svn.wordpress.org directory and move them to the filter directory of fail2ban.

$ wget https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/wp-fail2ban/trunk/filters.d/wordpress-hard.conf
$ wget https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/wp-fail2ban/trunk/filters.d/wordpress-soft.conf
$ wget https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/wp-fail2ban/trunk/filters.d/wordpress-extra.conf
$ sudo mv wordpress-*.conf /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/

I found this solution in this german blog post www.my-it-brain.de/wordpress/wordpress-mit-fail2ban-vor-brute-force-angriffen-schuetzen/

I’m having the same problem using the one-click WordPress installer and even after updating the three conf files to the current 2023 versions from SVN, it’s still saying that the filters are outdated.

I also noticed that when I SSH in using the web console, there is a readme that says fail2ban is installed in mu-plugins, but it’s not installed there. It’s in the regular plugins directory.

Want to learn more? Join the DigitalOcean Community!

Join our DigitalOcean community of over a million developers for free! Get help and share knowledge in Q&A, subscribe to topics of interest, and get courses and tools that will help you grow as a developer and scale your project or business.

KFSys
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
February 18, 2023

Hey @jochengoldenstein,

I’ll recommend to check the Docs page of the fail2ban WordPress plugin here:

https://docs.wp-fail2ban.com/en/5.0/index.html

As for the filters you have mentioned, you can replace/update them with the filters that can be found on this page here: