What events does 3CX security monitor?

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greychain

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Customer would like to know more about what events does 3CX security monitor? Are SSH login attempts monitored?

What can be done to harden a standard Debian 10 3CX install?
 
The PBX itself monitors and blocks brute force attempts via SIP and HTTPS. As well as rate limiting in the case of DoS. I don't believe it will record SSH login attempts, however those are stored in /var/log/auth.log in Debian 10.

If you'd like to harder the OS, limit the accepted source IPs that may SSH in.
The application (3CX) protects itself like the way fail2ban works.

You can decrease the number of failed attempts before blocking, and increase the time that an IP address stays on the block list.
 
So it doesn't use a fail2ban style log monitoring system
 
I've not personally dug into the log locations of the application that aren't presented via the GUI. Nor have I bothered to confirm if 3CX uses fail2ban itself or their own sauce.

My personal take on this: At that point, by the time the log entry says "IP blocked" they've already triggered their 3 strikes and are blocked for a few days. Most nasties are just drive-by harassment, and with the SIP credentials not containing the extension number it's effectively impossible to brute force if you're interrupting them. There are easier targets such as bare-naked Asterisk systems on the Internet, they'll get bored of being banned and move on. I don't even have the emails sent to me when IP is blocked because there's no further action to take so it's just noise.

Food for thought about hardening, aside from the obvious of "securing the box" you need to look at the attack surface you're presenting to the WAN and you'll need to craft a custom solution for this like sending syslog off-machine and doing log parsing. Which might break upon updating the application/OS from the GUI.

You could put an IDS/IPS solution in front of your 3CX instance, but you'd only be able to look for nasties like attacks against SSH (which shouldn't be public anyway), SIP and HTTPS. But it's only going to log things it knows to look for, which would be blocked anyway.

Aside from this being a lot of my own personal takes, I'd need to know what kind of goals you're looking to achieve outside of simply answering "what does it log?"
 
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And it's also been said many times by 3CX that the PBX should not be the first line of defense on your network.

If you're worried about SSH attacks then restrict this port on the parameter network.
 
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