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Ive got a server hosting a number of things, amd monitoring setup for a lot of stats. Got tired of seeing blips because various countries were beating on my ser
by CableNinja 2y ago
Ive got a server hosting a number of things, amd monitoring setup for a lot of stats. Got tired of seeing blips because various countries were beating on my server, not a DoS, but enough requests to notice, and sometimes generate an alert. I blocked 7 countries, in full, and the impact was fantastic. No more 2gb of logs generated every day by countries that have no business accessing my server.
Unless you own a global business, i see no reason to even allow other countries access. The potential for attacks is too great, especially from some very specific countries.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> I blocked 7 countries Russia, China, Nigeria, Romania, North Korea, Iran and Belarus [1]? [1] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-04-10-world-first-cybercrime-index-ranks-countries-cybercrime-threat-level https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-04-10-world-first-cybercrime-...
- ziddoap 2y agoHow/why did you pick these 7? Using your link: Ukraine, USA, UK, Brazil, & India all rank higher than Iran and Belarus. US & Ukraine rank higher than Nigeria and Romania.
- kasey_junk 2y agoThose countries likely have a higher chance of real traffic as well. If I’m doing business in Nigeria then obviously I can’t block it even if it ranks high on the threat level.
- ziddoap 2y agoYes, obviously you don't block the countries you plan to do business with. I got that much. It probably makes sense to leave the US out of the list, assuming the CableNinja is in North America. The rest seems pretty arbitrarily chosen, though. JumpCrisscross gave no additional context to why they left out Ukraine, Brazil, India, UK, when picking countries from the list they linked. They have higher cybercrime index ranks. Whether they have a higher chance of "real" traffic is highly dependent on the business in question. I'm sure there is some amount of thought behind the choice, beyond just using the index, which is why I'm asking.
- aftbit 2y agoLet me throw out a guess: Ukraine is a wartime ally, Brazil is the seventh largest country in the world, India is the first, and the UK speaks English and has a lot of connections to USA.
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoThey're each also popular IT outsourcing destinations who aren't sanctioned. You may not do business in Ukraine or Brazil, but chances are one of your customers or contractors do, and blocking those IPs isn't usually in the first or second swipe. (If you're blocking the UK and India, you're probably blocking all foreign IPs.)
- edm0nd 2y agoWe (a US org) block all countries listed on the OFAC list https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-information https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-inf...
- CableNinja 2y agoPretty close tbh. Sub romania for brazil, and nigeria, for... i dont remember right now
- throwaway2037 2y agoRomania!? I did a double-take, as it is a member of the European Union. I would think if their cyber-reputation was so terrible, there would be pressure from inside the EU to fix it.
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoThey’re a small economy with lots of hostile traffic, so while in the EU and not sanctioned like the rest of the bunch, I’ve commonly seen them on the chopping block.
- smithkl42 2y agoI'm the CTO of a US-based insurance company. Apart from some reinsurers in London and Bermuda, and a couple contractors in Canada, we don't do business outside the US. We've blocked all countries except those, and it has cut down massively on the folks attacking us.
- elcritch 2y agoLots of companies do this on their websites now using cloud flare or something similar. It’s practical. Still it’s frustrating as a user when you’re traveling over in Europe and can’t access your accounts to pay bills or whatnot.
- robocat 2y agoNext time I travel overseas I'll have a VPN ready. My bank had some technical problem that prevented access from overseas last time I traveled and I couldn't access my account (which was extremely inconvenient).
- elcritch 2y agoCommercial VPNs are often blocked too. I found a p2p vpn to my home network + ssh socks5 proxy to work well.
- gabeio 2y agoMost banks that will work with. For what ever reason the bank I now use knows most vpn providers and completely blocks all traffic from them so using a vpn is not an option either. The “vpn” I’ll have to use is tunneling back to my home ip. It’s actually quite frustrating.
- ZeroTalent 2y agoKinda similar, but when I looked at the finances, I was surprised by how much money we're getting from places like the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, and the Emirates.
- trod1234 2y ago
- jamespo 2y agoA nice GH project for this: https://github.com/friendly-bits/geoip-shell?tab=readme-ov-file#installation https://github.com/friendly-bits/geoip-shell?tab=readme-ov-f...
- jillyboel 2y agojust close the tcp sockets and you wont even notice them trying to connect and failing do you also log everyone who looks at your house? it's a self inflicted problem
- fc417fc802 2y agoAt least in the case of VPS my experience has been 99% failed ssh attempts. I just use nftables to rate limit those to 2 failed attempts per minute. Log size is quite modest and can easily filter out failed attempts when viewing.