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.

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    2·
    3 hours ago

    Yeah, a long time ago I started blocking outbound traffic to all but our laptops and it’s interesting how many things work perfectly well, but continually try to get out… the SolarPv inverter is VERY persistent to get to China due to an overly helpful installer setting it up on the wifi.

    I now have a firewall alias to only allow certain devices out and then just update that alias, do whatever (usually updates) and then revert the alias.