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itintheorytoday at 4:46 PM3 repliesview on HN

We implemented CrowdSec for bot/scraping mitigation. The architecture is sound, but it ended up having an unacceptable false positive rate for us. This may be an issue with any kind of IP reputation approach. After a couple of months of work getting it ready to go I had to turn it off after a couple of days.


Replies

Jnrtoday at 5:10 PM

Not sure what you implemented.

They provide several IP blacklists. None of those seem to be false positives. You can also add custom 3rd party blocklists.

They also provide several different rulesets. It is up to you to choose which ones to use and fine tune. LLMs can be very helpful with that.

And there are 3rd party dashboards and tools that help you manage it more easily.

I use the free version as a simple WAF on multiple servers and it blocks a lot of bots. It did require some initial finetuning though.

Are there any better open source solutions?

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mazzmatoday at 5:08 PM

Interesting, did you implement only IP reputation (via blocklist) or did you deploy the WAF as well? Regarding bot scrapping, you would probably want to try the new bot detection feature recently released

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UltraSanetoday at 5:08 PM

I have written my own honeypots to reduce the false positive rate. I simply have things like a VM with RDP and SSH open to the internet and any IP that tries to login gets banned at the firewall for x days. It works really well.