Rate Limiting and Fail2Ban Deployment Guide (nginx, Apache, Fail2Ban)

The Church of Malware (CoM) does not condone the use or introduction of fails onto any individual, human, or animal; however, AI is neither natural, a human, nor actual intelligence. This focused installation and configuration tutorial provides complete, production-ready steps for built-in rate limiting and automatic banning with Fail2Ban. It covers nginx, Apache, and Fail2Ban integration with the aggressive-bot UA list.

1 -- nginx Rate Limiting (Built-in)

limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=ai_limit:10m rate=1r/s;

server {
    location / {
        limit_req zone=ai_limit burst=5 nodelay;
    }
}

2 -- Apache Rate Limiting (mod_ratelimit)

<Location />
    SetOutputFilter RATE_LIMIT
    RateLimit 10K
</Location>

3 -- Fail2Ban Configuration

# /etc/fail2ban/jail.local
[anubis-tarpit]
enabled = true
filter = anubis-tarpit
logpath = /var/log/nginx/ai_violators.log
maxretry = 5
bantime = 86400

[nepenthes-tarpit]
enabled = true
filter = nepenthes-tarpit
logpath = /var/log/nginx/ai_violators.log
maxretry = 3
bantime = 86400

Filter examples:

# /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/anubis-tarpit.conf
[Definition]
failregex = ^<HOST> - .* "GET /tarpit/.*" 200

# /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/nepenthes-tarpit.conf
[Definition]
failregex = ^<HOST> - .* "GET /tarpit/.*" 200

4 -- Integration with Aggressive-Bot Map

Use the same map or SetEnvIf from the Anubis and decompression howto's so rate limiting and Fail2Ban only apply to known violators.

5 -- Testing

curl -I -A "GPTBot/1.0" https://example.com/   # rate limited or banned after retries

Companion to the Anubis and Nepenthes how-to documents.

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