Proposal: Add “Security & Hardening” section to Monad Ops Track

[Asplana92]

🛡️ Proposal: Security & Hardening Track for Monad Ops

While operating a public Monad RPC node, I noticed thousands of unauthorized SSH attempts and automated scans every week.
This shows that public infrastructure needs not only monitoring — but also proactive protection.

🔍 Observations

• 7,000+ failed SSH attempts detected in one week (fail2ban-client status sshd)
• Repeated scan activity from multiple regions (IPs auto-banned)
• Unauthorized HTTP/RPC probes targeting public endpoints

🔐 Suggested Content for Security Track

Add a short “Security & Hardening” section to the Ops track covering:

• UFW firewall configuration — only allow 80/443
• Fail2Ban setup — auto-ban repeated SSH login attempts
• Health timers — auto-restart RPC if unresponsive
• Unattended-upgrades — automatic security patches
• Basic monitoring metrics for banned IPs and intrusion attempts

🧰 Example setup

• Ubuntu 24.04 (Hetzner VPS)
• Fail2Ban + UFW + systemd timers
• Public RPC endpoint: monad.skandicescape.online
• Monitoring stack: Prometheus + Grafana + Nginx Exporter

📊 Example log output

sudo fail2ban-client status sshd
|- Currently banned: 55
|- Total failed: 7028
`- Total banned: 563

🌐 Author

asplana92 | Web3 Infra Builder

• GitHub: Asplana92
• Twitter: @02Tolik02
• Public dashboard: Grafana — Monad Node Metrics

[Asplana92]

🔒 Security Evidence

Thanks for reviewing this proposal 🙏
As a follow-up, here’s live security telemetry from my public Monad DevNet node.

Fail2Ban SSHD status showing over 9,000 failed login attempts and 50+ active bans on a Hetzner-hosted Ubuntu 24.04 node.

This highlights the importance of a Security & Hardening track alongside Monitoring & Ops —
real-world nodes constantly face brute-force attacks, and security automation (Fail2Ban, firewalls, alerts) is essential for community reliability.

— asplana92 | Web3 Infra Builder

[Asplana92]

✅ Follow-up:
Next step — I’m integrating the Fail2Ban security metrics into Prometheus and visualizing SSH intrusion attempts directly on the Grafana dashboard.
This way, Bootcamp participants will be able to see both node performance and real-time security events in one place — connecting DevOps monitoring with practical hardening.