Starting my blacklist journey

 

Recently with a lot of the “news” about MikroTik being that version X.XX has been compromised and then so has X.XX it got me looking a lot closer at security and what I can do to protect my own router and those that I manage.

The easiest answer primarily is don’t allow external access and make sure your firewall is impervious but then what about actual protection from these sources even before they get near your Winbox interface and what about enhancing that to protect client devices as well?

From reading through the MikroTik community I came across a thread by a guy called Dave who is offering brilliant blacklist capabilities for very cheap (when it comes to market) if you don’t mind running his script on your router ( forum thread here ). This consists of running his script on a scheduled basis and creating a firewall rule to block the traffic from the created list as both input & forward, source & destination with combinations thereof.

Dave’s list is brilliant, it takes from known sources of malicious software as well as his own network of honeypot servers so it will actively catch people trying to get at his servers. An advantage of this is it also does not take up much room as an exported RSC file as the script is to fetch a dynamic file which is imported and then deleted so keeping your file size low.

In addition to this I wanted my own form of very basic protection from specific geolocations, to do this I have found a site called mikrotikconfig.com.

There is an option here to generate an address list from selected countries, I simply chose the countries I don’t want with access, edited the file to use “myblocklist” instead of “countryip” and then created firewall rules to drop those also. The downside to doing this is all of the subnets are statically set so it will vastly increase your export RSC size but for mid to higher range devices this shouldn’t be an issue.

More to come as I develop and increase my blacklisting capabilities.

 

Back to a CHR?

Friday 13th was an exciting one in my household! Not only did I kill the internet for everyone for a good 3 hour period whilst I swapped from an Ikea Lack table to a “real” 6U cabinet causing huge disruption when my planned single patch panel turned into 3! I also fired up old faithful and stuck on a fresh copy of the latest (6.42.6) CHR into my VM box.

Now I have my spare ESXi box housed in the attic in a real rack it means I don’t need it screaming away in the cave so I can finally move back to a CHR build and keep it. My rough maths says the CHR unit will have around 4-5 times the performance of the RB3011 which will now get moved to the cave as a dedicated VLAN breakout switch (or maybe sold) but ultimately I can employ some far more complex queues without worrying that I’m running the CPU up too far.

My long term plan is to SFQ my LAN traffic but then pick out particular traffic types from that and SFQ them against each other whilst doing some PFIFO pulling them all together. I’ll try to document as much as I can but in short it will be a huge amount of packet marking so CPU grunt is needed. I’m even now tempted to look at upgrading the CPU so it’s more than a dual core!

Fun times ahead.

MikroTik Hairpin NAT With Dynamic WAN IP Tutorial Update

I’ve had my YouTube video out there for a while now (link) and whilst it does get a fair amount of traffic I have always wanted to follow it up with something written as well.

I’ve now just added in a full written tutorial of how to achieve this by using my easy to use drag and drop .rsc file. Head over to the MikroTik section to see more or for a direct link go here