https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Securing_Your_Router
Things to harden
- Delete default admin user
- Disable unused services and whitelist IP’s
- Secure SSH
- DNS
Delete default admin user
Before deleting the default admin user, create your own user account.
/user/add name=MyUsername group=full password=mylongsecurepassword
Note: running /user/add
will prompt you for the rest of the options.
Delete the default admin user with
/user remove admin
We want to delete the default admin user for two reasons. 1. There is no default password for this user. 2. It is a default username which means it will be targeted for brute force attacks.
Consider using the /users/groups for more granular control.
Disable unused services
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In the following, we disabled all services except SSH and Winbox. We also limit access to those services only from private “RFC 1918” IP addresses. Customize as needed.
/ip service set telnet disabled=yes set ftp disabled=yes set www disabled=yes set www-ssl tls-version=only-1.2 set ssh address="set winbox address="192.168.0.0/16,172.16.0.0/12,10.0.0.0/8" set api disabled=yes set winbox address="set winbox address="192.168.0.0/16,172.16.0.0/12,10.0.0.0/8" set api-ssl disabled=yes tls-version=only-1.2
for www-ssl and api-ssl, tls-version is not a required argument, but you may consider using it if you need the API or Webfig.
Secure SSH
/ip/ssh/set strong-crypto=yes allow-none-crypto=no always-allow-password-login=no host-key-size=4096
And regenerate the SSH host key. It will prompt for a [y/N], hit y to regenerate.
/ip/ssh/regenerate-host-key
DNS
Unless your device is being used as a DNS resolver, it is best to disable the “Allow Remote Request”
ip dns/set allow-remote-requests=no
If you do need it enabled, then be sure to add some firewall rules to keep your router from being used in amplification attacks.
add action=drop chain=input dst-port=53 in-interface-list=WAN protocol=udp
You can configure interface lists in /interface/list
or Interface -> Interface List in the gui
Or you can change to in-interface and specify the WAN interface directly. You could also set it to !LAN if you have a LAN interface list set up.