Protect against PHP file attack

Question

Our server has been attacked recently and looks something like the following in the logs:

[Mon Feb 18 09:18:43 2019] [IP_ADDRESS] script '/var/www/ynm.php' not found or unable to stat
[Mon Feb 18 09:18:43 2019] [IP_ADDRESS] script '/var/www/71.php' not found or unable to stat
[Mon Feb 18 09:18:44 2019] [IP_ADDRESS] script '/var/www/wadre.php' not found or unable to stat
[Mon Feb 18 09:18:44 2019] [IP_ADDRESS] script '/var/www/vm.php' not found or unable to stat
[Mon Feb 18 09:18:44 2019] [IP_ADDRESS] script '/var/www/test.php' not found or unable to stat
[Mon Feb 18 09:18:44 2019] [IP_ADDRESS] script '/var/www/1q.php' not found or unable to stat
[Mon Feb 18 09:18:45 2019] [IP_ADDRESS] script '/var/www/1111.php' not found or unable to stat
[Mon Feb 18 09:18:45 2019] [IP_ADDRESS] script '/var/www/errors.php' not found or unable to stat
[Mon Feb 18 09:18:46 2019] [IP_ADDRESS] script '/var/www/q.php' not found or unable to stat

These attacks go on for hours sometimes and freezes the server.

How can one protect against this? (This is for an Amazon EC2 instance for reference)

Thanks!

Answer 1

That's pretty common just use fail2ban and enable some jails like badbot. Those bots are inoffensive as long as you don't have big security breaches. Usually they scan for /admin or /phpmyadmin or pre-installed folders that's a good thing to change those folder's name.