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Bendertoday at 2:22 PM3 repliesview on HN

Many of those user-agents listed are often faked. Look up which ASN owns their IP. If I block most VPS providers most of the faked bots vanish. There are still some running from residential and phones using hijacked code (readers that are not really just readers but really multipurpose proxies). On that note, do not trust the linked source code but rather decompile the live code your phone is running and have AI analyze it.


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codegeektoday at 3:16 PM

Is there an easy way to block any requests originating from VPS etc instead of residential/commercial IP from legitimate users ? I know cloudflare does a few things but I really want to figure out a way to block any request say at nginx or caddy (reverse proxy) from reaching origin servers if they are not from an IP that is not a VPS etc.

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gavinhkingtoday at 2:27 PM

Yeah, that's exactly what these visits are: faked user agents that fail IP verification or Web Bot Auth. What's interesting is the surge across so many websites in the last week.

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bfleschtoday at 3:11 PM

Same for the origin IP address. The fiber leaving your country is tapped, and those people can inject packets with any origin IP that they want. Your ISP has no way to check if their peer actually received a certain packet from a certain country or not.

From a technical perspective, all this "china/russia" attribution is built on a quite shaky foundation. As a sysadmin you'd never know if it would be the British crown attacking your European company instead.

Not minimizing nation state cyber crime here, but the packet goes through many hands with different incentives.

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