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Blocking China IP Address Blocks

mergy.org

31–40 of 44 posts

Re: Blocking China IP Address Blocks

#31
post #7

I'm waiting for Dalton to complain about the use of the Svbtle theme...It seems to happen to every post that links to somewhere not svbtle that uses it.

Really Dalton Caldwell? Dalton is pretty cool. I don't think he cares. Dennis might not be too happy though, but I haven't heard anything from him.

Re: Blocking China IP Address Blocks

#32
post #23

I looked at the links in the article and its comments, but this one seemed much more "immediately useful" for me: (and not China-specific either, you can pick any ISO country code to add to your iptables) http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/block-entier-country-using-ipta... If you have a linux-based router, this can be a 5 minute job. In fact, I'll save you some time. I modified the script slightly to better suit my needs.…

You're right. Outright blocking is not a solution. I understand that. But, there comes a time when you just don't want to tell people to stop knocking on your door. You know?

Re: Blocking China IP Address Blocks

#33
post #7

I'm waiting for Dalton to complain about the use of the Svbtle theme...It seems to happen to every post that links to somewhere not svbtle that uses it.

https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle

wp-svbtle does comments and some other stuff above and beyond svbtle. I like it. Works for me for now.

Re: Blocking China IP Address Blocks

#34

We were very seriously considering if we should block China from our game servers recently. The reason is massive account compromises of our users. There are 300,000 IPs from China that are just trying public leaked email / password databases against our servers. With so many IPs, any kind of normal per IP limiting just doesn't work. Each IP is only trying 10 or so accounts per day. Blocking China was potentially a v…

It's tough. Security vs. ease of use for the end-user.

Re: Blocking China IP Address Blocks

#35
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Password length and complexity aren't all that critical if it's salted and hashed. Unless your users' passwords are something like "password" or their user names. Password length and complexity are important, if overplayed.

Ah yes, well... if they're using 'password' for the password, they've got bigger problems ;) Passwords that can be guessed in 1-3 tries should be excluded, naturally: password, 12345, 11111 etc... But mixed case, special character stuff is a bit redundant.

Pretty sure the issue I had to deal with was related to the Java OSX exploit. That being said, it is a total trade-off vs. security or ease of use for the end-users.

Re: Blocking China IP Address Blocks

#36
post #32
post #23

I looked at the links in the article and its comments, but this one seemed much more "immediately useful" for me: (and not China-specific either, you can pick any ISO country code to add to your iptables) http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/block-entier-country-using-ipta... If you have a linux-based router, this can be a 5 minute job. In fact, I'll save you some time. I modified the script slightly to better suit my needs.…

You're right. Outright blocking is not a solution. I understand that. But, there comes a time when you just don't want to tell people to stop knocking on your door. You know?

Sure! In fact, I was thinking about the pros/cons of doing it about the time Mandiant posted their APT1 writeup, and I decided to spend some time implementing it.

It's important to me to preserve the open nature of the internet. So I hope the karma bonus of posting some code offsets the karma loss from the code being "racist" ;-)

Great article, thanks!

Re: Blocking China IP Address Blocks

#37

This would backfire. The goal, I suppose, is that the Chinese government go after hackers in China more; but even if this happened on a mass scale, the Chinese government would /love/ for more services to be run domestically. They don't need Google or Facebook, what makes you think they won't survive well without any of our sites?

True. I am a total "small fish" and China could give a damn, but I think I am just sick of even dishing any bandwidth to known bad address blocks.

Re: Blocking China IP Address Blocks

#38
post #4

Many of us have users (actual valid users) who live in and visit China and other countries in the world. So we don't block a IP because we think it is in China. Use rate limiting and block bad IPs that are brute-forcing services (don't lock accounts) then you'll be able to serve your users while keeping the bad guys out.

Absolutely. Gladly, that is not an issue in my case.

Re: Blocking China IP Address Blocks

#39
post #10

If you resort to blocking IP ranges to prevent attacks, you are missing the point of how to properly respond to an attack. Blocking ranges might by an extra layer of security (philosophy of defense in depth), but in addition to that you should analyze how this email user account was compromised. Weak password was bruteforced? Start enforcing strong passwords. Email server vulnerability exploited? Patch your server. E…

I haven't talked with the user involved besides trying to stop the bleeding, but it seems it was around the OSX java exploit on a BYOD mac laptop. You are totally correct though, I could do more to restrict this. But, if I can nuke the ip block because I will never get legit traffic from it anyway why not?

Re: Blocking China IP Address Blocks

#40
post #19

Blocking an entire country sounds very stupid from the technological and moral point of view (and yes, it may make sense from the financial/time pov). 1) that doesn't make your shitty (lets be rough here) passwords & web apps secure. You didn't care for security yesterday, it's not going to come to you by blocking "china". 2) that doesn't stop anyone from proxying elsewhere 3) the more doing it, the more segmented th…

You're right on all accounts. But, the internet "works" on a common understanding that the various entities involved act with some form responsibility. That is NOT the case right now with China. I can beef-up security all I want, but perhaps people will get to a point when even interacting and rejecting bad connections is a waste?
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