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Introduction Bots are an increasing threat to websites, whether through fake sign ups, brute force login attempts, content scraping, or resource abuse. If you are running applications on Coolify, an open source platform as a service alternative, you need a simple and efficient way to protect them without unnecessary complexity. This is where Anubis comes in. In this guide, you will learn: What Anubis is and why it is useful How it helps stop bots before they reach your application A real world example of deploying Anubis with WordPress on Coolify What is Anubis and How Does It Stop Bots? Anubis is an open source challenge proxy that protects your web applications from automated bots and abusive traffic. It works as a reverse proxy that requires clients to solve a computational proof of work challenge before granting access. This mechanism dramatically reduces malicious traffic without impacting legitimate users. ...

Nginx Rate Limit Introduction Nginx is a powerful web server that can be used to serve static content, load balance, and act as a reverse proxy. It is also capable of rate limiting requests to prevent abuse and protect your server from being overwhelmed. I seen various guides on how to set up rate limiting in Nginx, but I wanted to write my own since I had a specific use case in mind and I couldn’t find an example anywhere. ...

What happened? Backstory I was setting up a new subdomain on my VPS, I thought I had everything correctly configured but the new subdomain was being routed to another application. After an hour of troubleshooting I made the decisions to reconfigure the whole server using nginxconfig.io as a baseline. Within 15 minutes of entering all the information, downloading and extracting to my server I had everything ready to go. The attack I requested certificates from Lets Encrypt and had malicious requests sent to my services that were mitigated by Crowdsec. ...

What is a dork? A dork is a filter that can be applied to searches to narrow down the results to what you are looking for. This is often used to find potential documents / hidden pages that were accidentally exposed to the internet. This can be used in recon stage since it does not interact with a target / organisation directly. There are many dork operators here is a list and what effect they have on the results. ...

What is NGINX? NGINX is open source software for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and more. It started out as a web server designed for maximum performance and stability. In addition to its HTTP server capabilities, NGINX can also function as a proxy server for email (IMAP, POP3, and SMTP) and a reverse proxy and load balancer for HTTP, TCP, and UDP servers. source What is a WAF? A WAF or web application firewall helps protect web applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic between a web application and the Internet. It typically protects web applications from attacks such as cross-site forgery, cross-site-scripting (XSS), file inclusion, and SQL injection, among others. A WAF is a protocol layer 7 defense (in the OSI model), and is not designed to defend against all types of attacks. This method of attack mitigation is usually part of a suite of tools which together create a holistic defense against a range of attack vectors. source We now have a general understanding of what Nginx is and what a WAF can do here are the two main products that can be used: ...