I’m trying to understand the bot problem in the internet and finding more ways to defend myself. One thing that I can’t seem to understand is why most bots, scrapers and crawlers seem to have residential IPs.

  • Is it that ISPs are being paid by tech-bros to assign them these IPs?
  • Is it that residential devices have been hacked /contain malware that does this?
  • Is it trivial for companies to assign themselves residential IPs?
  • Paid volunteers are doing this for AI companies?

Or is there is some other reason for this?

Obviously this is a problem because one can rotate / cycle through residential IPs and if I aggressively block each offender in my logs permanently, then the next person assigned this IP who may be a legitimate user will be unable to access my site.

  • communism@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    if I aggressively block each offender in my logs permanently, then the next person assigned this IP who may be a legitimate user will be unable to access my site.

    temp bans exist for this reason. You can use something like fail2ban for it, or that may be overkill for your purposes, but any mechanism that blocks the IP address for a short amount of time will work. My f2b blocks spammers’ IP addresses for a day, and I don’t see repeat bans which means the spammers aren’t coming back on the same IP address, so the short ban works to stop a given spam attack.