Increase of Malicious Activities and Implementation of reCaptcha

In recent time, I've seen the increase of malicious activities such as login attempts or phishing emails to some accounts I manage. Let me list some of them and the actions taken.

SSH Access Attempts

This happened on a server that host a Gitlab server. Because of this case, I started to limit the incoming traffic to the server using internal and cloud firewall provided by the cloud provider. I limit the exposed ports, connected network interfaces, and allowed protocols.

Phishing Attempts

This typically happened through email and messaging platform such as Whatsapp and Facebook Page messaging. The malicious actors tried to share a suspicious link lured as invoice, support ticket, or something else.

Malicious links shared

Spammy Bot

The actors leverage one of public endpoint on my website to send emails. Actually, the emails won't be forwarded anywhere except to my own email so this just full my inbox. This bot is quite active, but I'm still not sure what the intention is, I haven't taken any action on this case.

Spammy emails

Login Attempts

Recently, I start to receive notification from my Gitlab instance that my access to the platform get locked because excessive amount of login attempts. This makes me reviewing security of my Gitlab instance and I found out that Gitlab already support reCaptcha integration. But, after I implemented the feature, the login attempt is still quite active.

Frequent Gitlab notification about the locked account

Enable reCaptcha on Gitlab

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