Comment by CableNinja
1 month 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.
I'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.
Lots 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.
Next 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).
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Have you considered the additional cost of making it harder for your customers to do business with you, as well as the limited visibility that you set up for attacks that may become multi-stage in nature later?
You never see or collect the information by blocking everything at the outset.
In a world where you can proxy past these blocks fairly trivially, that's information you don't have for attribution later.
Defense in depth, or layered defenses are a best approach, but not if they blind you equally.
As someone who has whitelisted only US IP address space for my employer and blocked everything else I can attest that is DRASTICALLY reduces hostile traffic to us. I have an RDP honeypot that was blocking dozens of IPs every day before the whitelist and now it blocks 1 or 2 a day.
Kinda 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.
> 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-...
How/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.
We (a US org) block all countries listed on the OFAC list
https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-inf...
Those 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.
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Romania!? 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.
They’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.
Pretty close tbh. Sub romania for brazil, and nigeria, for... i dont remember right now
A nice GH project for this: https://github.com/friendly-bits/geoip-shell?tab=readme-ov-f...
just 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
At 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.