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.