[Info-vax] List of denied IP addresses

[David Turner]

We also use Spamhaus, (zen) and god knows how many other blacklists
The htaccess file we have been using, though perhaps over cautious, has 
blocked potential harm
from several unruly countries. We had a credit card scam run on our 
website a while back before we implemented this
It costs us $2500 from attempted credit-card bot authorizations. That 
alone was a good reason to block any group of ips
We do have log files and they did show numerous hits from very specific 
countries and cities

So...


On 3/25/2022 9:11 AM, Dennis Boone wrote:
>   > I figure we don't sell to Russia any more anyway. So where's the harm?
>
> The potential harm is that such lists are at best approximations:
>
> They're prone to not having _all_ the IPs assigned to a given geographic
> area, due to errors or horse trading of IP blocks.  Thus they may give a
> false sense of security.
>
> They're prone to including things that are no longer assigned to a given
> geographic area, for the same reasons.  They may therefore block wanted
> traffic.
>
> They fail to account for VPNs.  Because of this, they may block wanted
> traffic from legitimate but anonymity-conscious users who happened to be
> assigned an outbound point within a blacklisted block.
>
> They fail to account for the trivial availability of virtual machine
> availability as a launching point for whatever activity is (not) being
> blocked by the use of the list.
>
> None of this means blacklists are completely useless, but one should not
> use them without a firm understanding of the tradeoffs.
>
> De