I got over 3k failed login attempts yesterday morning which was the most ive ever seen. I did some research and Fail2Ban seems to be a good step to stopping this. I have installed it and it seems to be going ok, but i have noticed that it is blocking access from anything that isn't an SSH client.
I use windows and i like to keep backups of the server on my laptop. I use Cygwin to give me access to rsync. I also use WinSCP to log into the server to modify any files as I am completely useless at using vi. When Fail2Ban is running, i can no longer access my server using both of these application.
I am running Centos6 and i am using the root user to login with both applications. Is there a way to get around this without causing security issues?
This is the error i get from WinSCP.
Cannot initialize SFTP protocol. Is the host running a SFTP server?