This article will serve as a quick tutorial on installing and configuring fail2ban on an Amazon EC2 instance.
I like to think of fail2ban as a ‘second line’ of defence against systematic attempts to break through and access SSH on a server.
First line of defence should always be disabling the root log-in, using strong passwords/using private keys for log-on, etc.
It can do a lot more than protecting against brute-force SSH attacks using regex’s but that is not in the scope of this tutorial.