Mailgun is leaking my DigitalOcean server IPs via emails deployed for Discourse which is resulting in repeated DDoS attacks. Received: from localhost.localdomain (sposting.com [**REAL IP HERE**]) by mxa.mailgun.org with ESMTP id 78c1220.7fe02c20b530-smtp-out-n03; Wed, 15 Mar 2017 01:30:08 -0000 (UTC) No DDoSers have discovered this yet. Additionally, a security researcher just pasted me the following information and told me it was pulled using “linux dig” IP address **REAL IP HERE** Reverse DNS (PTR record) sposting.com DNS server (NS record) ns3.digitalocean.com (198.41.222.173) ns1.digitalocean.com (173.245.58.51) ns2.digitalocean.com (173.245.59.41) ASN number 393406 ASN name (ISP) Digital Ocean, Inc. IP-range/subnet 138.197.80.0/20 138.197.80.0 - 138.197.95.255 So it may be leaking in other ways as well but I can’t totally confirm that. Any ideas?

Derp. Thanks. That won’t prevent the IP from leaking via Mailgun though, will it? I think I might be limited to Mailgun API only. No idea how I’m going to integrate that if so.

Mailgun is a separate problem, but you’ve got to close off every avenue of leakage if you want to remain DDoS proof.

[image] anon67292109: Mailgun is leaking my DigitalOcean server IPs via emails deployed for Discourse I warned you for that: [image][PAYING GIG] migrating servers, tweaking rate limits and implementing signup captcha Make sure your outgoing emails don’t leak the original IP address I don’t think Mailgun has any options or settings for this. It’s best to set up a separate relay server inbetween Discourse and Mailgun, that removes those headers. See this article: https://major.io/p/remove-sensitive-information-from-email-headers-with-postfix/

[image] anon67292109: I think I might be limited to Mailgun API only. If you did a standard install, you’re delivering mail via SMTP, not the API.

[image] michaeld: See this article: https://major.io/p/remove-sensitive-information-from-email-headers-with-postfix/ Going to try to implement this. I’ll let you know how I make out ITT. [image] pfaffman: If you did a standard install, you’re delivering mail via SMTP, not the API. Yes naturally. I’m either going to set up a separate relay server or try to locate and alter the email send code in Discourse; which I understand vanishes upon updates and fresh installs. Uncharted territory. My first attempt will be the former method as it seems the simplest approach.

Yeah. The relay server is the cleaner of those solutions. You could offer a bounty for someone to write a send-with-mailgun-api plugin. I have no idea how hard it’d be, but there are hooks to use mailgun webhooks.

Solved. The quick and dirty solution was indeed a mail relay server. I set up a cheap $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet running Postfix as a Mailgun relay and a custom header_checks file to prevent the original requesting IP, i.e. my Discourse droplet, from being displayed in the email headers. Discourse now talks to that mailserver opposed to connecting directly to smtp.mailgun.org A non-SMTP Mailgun API solution be it a plugin, or as an official Discourse option would be incredibly useful for anyone using Cloudflare. An additional fix could be pushed internally at Mailgun as well if they added an option to hide the original requesting IP as is done automatically through their API. In the meantime this works fine enough. Thanks to @michaeld, @pfaffman and @mpalmer for the sound advice and I hope this thread serves as reference in the future for anyone experiencing similar issues.

Just for curiosity I checked what Mandrill does, and yes it leaks my server IP address too. So if I were concerned hiding the original IP gainst DOS, I would setup a mailrelay .

For those who are looking at this today, someone who wants to DDOS you can drop anything that discourse tries to fetch, point the url of the file to a server they control and get your IP address. Relay for the mail server isn’t enough, you need a rule to send new outbound connections from discourse to go through a proxy or similar. We had several false starts with trying to get this working against all bad actors out there and ended up with Flokinet in Romania, they have a proprietary DDOS shield to the tune of 1.4 Tb/ps IIRC.

You could also use firewall rules to disable all connections except from cloudflare.

Mailgun leaking server's real IP behind Cloudflare

Product Support

codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) May 16, 2019, 8:31pm 23

You do not understand. If they can flood your pipe with infinite requests you are doomed, “dropping in firewall” does nothing at all for that scenario. Once your IP is exposed the game is over.

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Mailgun leaking server's real IP behind Cloudflare

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