mod_sec rule for X-forwarded-for blocking

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5

Issue

mod_sec rule for X-forwarded-for blocking
Description

we are having some nastiness with what appeared to be a distributed (500+ ip's) coming at us from a fake ip, crawling our production site.

we are looking for some help constructing a mod_sec rule that would block by X-Forwarded-For or something similar. the production site has been up and and down since early am.

thanks in advance,

Resolution

Customer determined that mod_security was not the proper solution for this instance. The attack appears to not be a denial of service attack but a crude, distributed screen scrap/search engine like crawling that did not appear to be originating from legitimate search engines. Because the ip's appeared to be coming from behind a proxies, there was concern that a rule like the sample mod_security rule would block all proxy traffic:

   SecRule REQUEST_HEADERS_NAMES "^x-forwarded-for" "log,deny,status:403,t:lowercase,msg:'Proxy Server Used'"

Customer instead decided to use the following re-write rule in this case:

RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-FORWARDED-FOR} ^ip_address$
    #RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-FORWARDED-FOR} ^another_ip_address$ [OR]
    RewriteRule .* - [F]

This will work as long as a different proxy IP address is not used.

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