Blocking a Nation's IP Space 404
SComps writes "The Register has a good commentary about blocking Chinese IP space and some of the pros and cons surrounding that action. The question I post to Slashdot: "What is your opinion of this and what do you propose to help correct this?" Additionally, what sort of actions do other Slashdot users take to protect themselves from rogue IP space, be it national borders or even retail broadband/dialup providers such as wannadoo or comcast, roadrunner, etc?" The author of the article raises an interesting point, will this 'slippery slope' prove too difficult to walk?
Looking for open proxies (Score:3, Interesting)
I am chinese (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My ban list is extensive but I'm a home user on (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure - I block 'em (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically - if we know we want a prospect in China, Korea, etc. to use our site, we'll open something for them - otherwise they should just go the heck away.
If enough people -j DROP China, etc., maybe somethign will get done about. (I know - wishful thinking).
What a coincidence (Score:2, Interesting)
I work for a UK company who deals with multi-nationals, but they all have European channels. I can't see such a block having anything but a positive effect.
Just surprising that the very day I have this thought there is a story on Slashdot.
Re:My ban list is extensive but I'm a home user on (Score:2, Interesting)
You are free to block any addresses you want. However, I must ask what makes you so important that people must use the mail service you dictate in order to contact you? I think that doing what you have done would cause more inconvenience to myself than anything else. If people couldnt get through to me, they wouldn't switch providers, they would just stop emailing my pompous ass. The point is to block the bad, while letting the good stuff through. False positives only cause problems for ME, nobody else.
-d
Depends on service (Score:1, Interesting)
I used to block (Score:1, Interesting)
Got the info from http://www.completewhois.com/statistics/data/ips-
iptables -A INPUT -s x.x.x.x/x -j DROP
in one big script.
Why? I used to serve large files in an IRC channel with a fat EDU connection, but a handful of tools from
Re:Baby with the bathwater? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't consider blocking mail based on geography alone unless I could get input from everyone the policy would affect. You can do that as a home user, and you can do that as a business, but IMO it's not an option for an ISP.
Firewalled people (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What big company.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, this approach isn't going to be practical in businesses that deal with large numbers of companies or agencies in China, but if you are just dealing with a handful of companies then you are fine. Plus, the chances are that even if your company is heavily involved with China, then it might not be for some of the other rowdy IP blocks on the Internet and could apply the blocks there instead. Or just concentrate on the large blocks of IPs assigned to home users; with the prevalance of BotNets at the moment, that's where the vast majority of the hostile traffic seems to be coming from anyway.
For corporate emial I don't see the issue (Score:3, Interesting)
If our firewall could easily block IP addresses, I'd do that too.
Not neccessarily the average Chinese surfer (Score:2, Interesting)
Chinanet Henan Province and Chinatelecom are notorious homes to US based spammers. I've written a brief paper on the subject here
http://www.abcseo.com/papers/referrer-spam.htm [abcseo.com]
Ok I've moved a bit off the topic of hacking attemps - but hacking/spamming are two sides of the same coin. Personally I've refrained from banning the whole of China when the problem seems to be some rogue individuals and ISPs.
I have blocked China two years ago (Score:2, Interesting)
The next days everything was slow and the log showed that I had a lot of request from outside ip address to other outside ip address. The majority of those address came from China.
I change the setting in apache but I still had request by the hundred. I finally called my ISP and we have blocked a lot of range from China and right after the traffic went to normal.
I have talk with my boss and have decided that it was not worth the trouble to enable those ip ranges since we are not doing business with China.
Re:Officially insane. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, it is wrong because they haven't notified their customers and given them a choice about leaving or staying. It isn't a hard sell ('our servers will be more secure, you'll lose China and Korean readers - but if you want a specific IP we can assist you') but customers deserve to know the state of play.
In fact, I think this should go as far as sending a daily email of blocked spam emails (from and subject lines only, of course).
What's so insane about it? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is just an example, but the idea goes for other kinds of sites too...
Purpose of blocking (Score:5, Interesting)
The point of refusing access from certain IP addresses is not to deny service to any particular individual (or nationality, in case of entire countries being affected), but to protect against likely abuse and encourage individuals to use some other IP address. As long as your boycott is aimed at their network infrastructure (for aiding abuse) rather than at the country itself (for political reasons), individual users routing their traffic via other networks is not a problem; it's what you want them to do. The idea is that the secondary network will sort out the abuse (by making sure they know who their customers are, or by other means). If they fail to do so, they will be blacklisted too.
Therefore I see no point in specifically blacklisting any single country, if not for political reasons. Entire countries are blacklisted because they conveniently map to large portions of IP address space. Some Chinese universities probably received their IP blocks before the commercial operators did, and may therefore have addresses in completely separate ranges. If the universities are a bit better at managing their networks, and the bulk of the abuse therefore comes from the commercial blocks, there is no reason both should be listed merely for being assigned to the same country.
Likewise, a single address block may contain several operators in different countries, causing them all to be blacklisted simply because telling them apart takes too much time. It's all about network abuse history, not about nationality. And, I wouldn't have to rely on everyone else blocking a single abused network either, unless they all were to forward that abuse to me.
I have however considered blocking mail servers indiscriminately "bouncing" virus messages having our domain forged onto them, when they have received those messages from IP addresses (often Chinese ones) already included in public blacklists. They could avoid such action on my part by simply using said blacklists themselves, but exactly how they solve their problem is up to them. If they simply avoid "notifying" innocent people every time they receive junk mail or other abuse, I will not bother them.
Re:My ban list is extensive but I'm a home user on (Score:4, Interesting)
Redundancy. To two different ISPs.
If they don't like the cost for it, ask them what the cost is to be without internet access for 2 days.
Re:My ban list is extensive but I'm a home user on (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, the "ultimate democracy." Where despotic regimes harbor cyber miscreants who piss off the inhabitants of "civilized" countries, who block those despotic regimes, therefore denying the innocent inhabitants of those regimes the ability to communicate unfettered with the rest of the free world.
"Hey, there seem to be all these hackers in China. Let's block the entire nation of China from the rest of the Internet. That will really help the Chinese Internet censorship situation."
But I guess your own convenience is more important that giving those people a conduit to freedom.
As somebody else pointed out, an individual has every right to block or receive whatever traffic they wish. But if you're a network administrator at an ISP or government who thinks he's doing some good by closing off these segments of the Internet, you're nothing but low life scum who cares more about his temporary comfort that other people's lives.
We did this with our online store (Score:3, Interesting)
This was when we were first getting up and running with minimal staff. One day we looked and saw "JESUS CHRIST! Someone Just bought $678 worth of fake cock! Yeah!"
We then realized these folks were just testing to see if the credit card numbers they stole were still active, and cancelled the order.
I wrote all sorts of checking routines and so on to make it harder to submit that kind of shit, but in the end it was just easier to not even let placecs like Hungary and Pakistan in, becuase really, it was more trouble to week out the fakes than the odd valid order a year from those areas is worth.
I wish... (Score:5, Interesting)
Until the glorious day we segragated our mail users. We set up a new beta mail server and split our users into two groups. Those needing international mail, and those not needing it. Over the course of 3 months, we informed users of the change and provided an easy opt-in one-click process to make sure they could send/recieve international mail.
After that grace period, we simply shut off international mail on our main server by blocking any IP space outside the US.
The load on our mail servers (4 dual CPU machines) went from averaging around 50% down to 5% and stayed there.
In our polling of our own customers, we found that 90% or more of them never had any intention or desire to send/recieve international mail. Our spam load went from several thousand spam messages a minute to less than a thousand per day.
The people that needed international mail were put on the new server and left open to all mail.
For the next few months, the staff at our office didn't have to buy lunch or snacks because that corny AOL commercial actually happened. We had customers in all the time taking us out to lunch and dropping off brownies, cupcakes, etc... our satifaction rate was never higher and I would venture to guess that we would not have been that loved had we sent everyone $50 cash.
Why isn't this a more popular choice? Is there really that much of a NEED in the general internet population for international mail? There wasn't at our company.
I think we could make international mail a feature add-on much like web hosts make CGI, PHP, or mySQL a feature add-on. Sure, to me those are just staples, but not everyone needs all that.
Sure, there's still in-country spam sources... but NOTHING like what comes from outside.
Re:My Little Part. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
china, korea, etc. are totally rogue. they become more widely blocked each day. both china and korea are hellbent on becoming LANs. which they will be until they realize there's a problem and start dealing with all their criminal operators.
Re:My ban list is extensive but I'm a home user on (Score:5, Interesting)
230 years ago, this nation I live in was under a (different) "despotic regime" - some people decided to take some action, and it changed. The assistances they received happened after they started, not because they whined.
As an individual internet user, I have not ever blocked an email from a political dissident due to its political content. As a website author, I have not blocked anyone from viewing my site.
As a businessman, I respect and obey the laws governing my use of advertising online, by email (I fully comply with CAN-SPAM) and other means as applicable.
The above said, anyone who cannot see fit to play by the same rules can go figure out a different game *elsewhere*, instead of trying to play some bait (political freedom of speech) and switch (illegal spam serving) game.
There is no "divine right" nor requirement to maintain a web presence, to maintain completely open networks, to provide a podium upon which some poor abused oppressed individual can spout their issues to everyone else, no matter how "justified" they might be.... This whole intarweb thing borders so closely to being completely fictional it isn't funny - please *do* seek to force your beliefs concerning how things *should* be onto the current way things are - only time will tell how successful you were.
Please *don't* consider the over-worked net administrators as enemies: The real enemies are those spam servers who bury any legitimate content coming out of dissenting China more effectively than any locally-applied blocks ever could.
China is merely a staging point (Score:1, Interesting)
The systems there were bogged down with spyware and viruses alike. Most of them contained backdoors/trojan horses.
The majority of computer terminals I saw in china were unpatched windows machines, usually running the wpa_kill patch to prevent activation. Even if they did update all of these systems, the activation counter would reactivate, knocking out their computers. They have no inclination to pay for Windows, so they just use the computers until they stop working, and reinstall.
These users don't have a clue on how to spam or hack or unleash viruses... their computers are merely zombies.
Go after the zombie masters
Re:My ban list is extensive but I'm a home user on (Score:2, Interesting)
and .nz?
Hey, what did we NZers do to you?
You don't happen to be Australian, do you? ;)
Re:What's so insane about it? (Score:5, Interesting)
If your website is not hackable from the US it's not hackable from China or Russia.
So, why are you blocking China and Russia but not the US?
Re:I wish... (Score:2, Interesting)
I am in France and 99% of spam I get is from the USA, for US products.
The actual machines being used to transmit ARE NOT in the USA. The problem is at the source - i.e. the companies who are doing the spamming. The secondary problem is that people in China don't know how to secure their machines...
Re:What's so insane about it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Just one?
I can think of a few more than that just off the top of my head:
Oklahoma City (Timothy McVeigh - white male)
Atlanta Olympics (Eric Rudolph - white male)
The anthrax-postal scare (still unsolved, but evidence points to the anthrax source being a U.S. military lab).
Various murders committed by the Unabomber would probably be classified as terrorism (Ted Kaczynski - white male)
And that's not even going back a full 20 years. I think, at least for attacks on U.S. soil, the late 20s to early 30s white male disgruntled former soldier fits the profile of a terrorist much more closely than any Arab.