New VPN / Proxy Blocking

[anthony]

Unfortunately, the amount of spam has increased here due to the sites popularity across global search. 99.99% is not seen my members, but its there behind the scenes. 99.99% of spam is done via VPN's and Proxies, and whilst I recognise and accept VPN's have legitimate use, unfortunately I just can't allow them any longer. I have banned VPN blocks at DNS for a long time now, but VPN companies know this happens, so they change their IP blocks weekly, making a block of 256 IP's used for spam and legitimate purpose, banned, then the company removes that block and introduces a new block the next week.

It's a nasty cycle so that legitimate users aren't blocked everywhere they go online due to the misuse of VPN's.

To put in in perspective, whilst I have hundreds of thousands of bad actors banned at DNS, in under 5 minutes running here, the software blacklisted 350 VPN IP's attempting to do nasty stuff.

 

[In the weeds]

Thank you for keeping us safe.

 

[anthony]

To further my point, in just 12hrs it has blacklisted nearly 9000 VPN's, most of which is trying to spam here.

 

[anthony]

And you can see the time posted between the above and this one, and it has blacklisted couple thousand.

 

[Freida]

That explains it! I couldn't figure out why I had to turn off my VPN to get the site to load
I just figured the internet hated me
Thank you for always watching out for us

 

[anthony]

Working through some teething issues with this, fingers crossed, it is all good now. I had an issue where it was stopping due to a caching issue, but that should now be fixed. Unfortunately in testing, some legit users got blocked who were not using a VPN, but that was quickly rectified.

Should be good now... still monitoring, but it has stopped an insane amount of spam with no ongoing effort required by staff. This pushers spammers to use legitimate telco IP's, which I can block with greater ease, as telco's don't keep issuing IP's for reuse by spammers.

 

[anthony]

With little issues being discovered and fixed, I have cleared the blacklisted cache to start new, hopefully only getting legitimate spam sources. So far, so good... but I found an issue with iCloud Private Relay yesterday, which is now rectified for Apple users.