<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nThis seems… really agressive. Entire countries are blocked by this. I’m not talking about the usual hotspots of trouble like China or Russia. I’m talking about New Zealand and large parts of Austrailia as well. Big parts of the English speaking world. <\/p>\n
When you see it blocking something like 203.0.0.0 to 203.255.255.255 it means nobody with an IP adress starting with 203 can reach me. There are about 16 million possible<\/em> addresses in the range, although not all values will be used and often many people will share a single address. I’m not knowledgeable enough to say how many people might be behind a particular range, but the number is likely in the millions. And there are a lot of those sorts of entries in the list above.<\/p>\n Millions upon millions of people blocked, in order to keep out what might be a couple hundred troublemakers. (Not that I have millions of readers, my readership isn’t even a hundred thousand. I’m just saying that if any of those people try and visit, they won’t get through.) Each of those ranges is like a door. Behind the door is perhaps a hundred or so real readers, several million people who might<\/em> stumble on the site someday, and maybe<\/strong> a farm of spambots that will cripple the site. Locking all of these doors is overkill, but I don’t want to run around unlocking them at random and get attacked again. When that happens, nobody can reach the site or a number of other sites on the same machine. <\/p>\n I’m still mulling over what to do about this. I’m pretty sure my host went overboard in blocking IPs, but without knowing what I’m doing, un-blocking them all will just invite another attack. If that happens, my host will just block them all again and I’ll be right back where I started. <\/p>\n Is it really that hard to hunt down these spammers and have them all killed?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I mentioned last week that this site caused a ruckus for my host. Incoming traffic in the form of a deliberate attack (unlikely) or waves of attempted spam had slowed the webserver to a crawl. This wasn’t just a problem for me, but for everyone else hosted on the same machine. In an attempt to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}