Cloudflare Global Threat Detection Activated

[anthony]

For near a decade I have been able to mitigate threats to the site, server, case by case, though its just becoming far too difficult. I mitigated a batch of threats a month or so ago, and all that's happened is the offenders moved the same tactics to another country servers. Rinse and repeat.

The easiest and most unobtrusive way for me to counter this, is to activate an automated check for near every visitor to the site to ensure the visitor is a real person. For 99% of cases, this will all be automatic. You will see a brief Cloudflare message where the check is undertaken, then redirected to the site. This will save for a period of time before checking again.

Fingers crossed, this goes well. I have left out some places, as I have them mitigated already and am comfortable with the results. The rest of the world, blanket approach.

 

[anthony]

If you run into issues, delete the cookie for myptsd.com and login new. I had a single issue posting for the first time after this, so I deleted the cookie, logged in new, no more issues, as Cloudflare now views me as all OK.

 

[AngelKeeperJ]

Thank you @anthony for the countless hours you have worked and the brainpower you must have to keep the site up, running, and safe! I appreciate your time and efforts!

 

[anthony]

To outline the last 24hrs with a more global approach in place, less than 1% of attempted traffic (excluding allowed bots) to the site is human, where the challenge is solved, whether automatically or manually by a person.

This is the nonsense websites put up with, and as any site grows with more content, this gets progressively worse, wasting server resources in the wrong places. This is why we use Cloudflare, to block things at the DNS and not at the server, as it never makes it that far.

 

[anthony]

I've just extended our ASN blocking further, trying to get specific from spam lists, hoping it doesn't capture any small ISP within it... fingers crossed. These ASN assignments are hosting companies with spam rates from their servers of 10% to 50%. There is no requirement for any hosting server to access this site, hence blocked. A bunch of hosting companies just don't care if their servers are used for spam, whether web or email, they seem to prefer taking the $$$ over complying with relevant laws.