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Comment by cornedor

8 hours ago

No, since they're simply too many. For an e-commerce site I work for, we once had an issue where some bad-actor tried to crawl the site to set up scam shops. The list of IPs were way too broad, and the user-agents way too generic or random.

Could you not also use an ASN list like https://github.com/brianhama/bad-asn-list and add blocks of IPs to a blocklist (eg. ipset on Linux)? Most of the scripty traffic comes from VPSs.

  • Thanks to widespread botnets, most scrapers fall back to using "residential proxies" the moment you block their cloud addresses. Same load, but now you risk accidentally blocking customers coming from similar net blocks.

    Blocking ASNs is one step of the fight, but unfortunately it's not the solution.

    • Hypothetically, as a cyber-criminal, I'd like to thank the blacklist industry for bringing so much money into criminal enterprises by making residential proxies mandatory for all scraping.