Discussion

tptacek: I think all the points about IP reputation impact are well taken, but as someone who had to deal with the RIRs at an ISP before and who now works at a firm that buys blocks, I would 10x rather operate in today's environment than in the old RIR environment. It's transparent and predictable by comparison.I never had much faith in reputation to begin with, and the residential block issue is muddied by the fact that large-scale residential proxies already make that an unreliable abuse check.

mrbluecoat: If only those services required age verification../s

phil21: Hard to take much of this too seriously, since there are total misrepresentations like this:> Their automated reputation management system actively maintains the "cleanliness" of leased IPs, ensuring they don't end up on blacklists — which is a polished way of saying they launder IP reputation as a service.No, as someone who leases some unused blocks via IPXO the entire point of the reputation management system is to centralize abuse reports for them to respond to so they get categorized, tracked, and handled. If more than a few come in the lease gets canceled as that’s against the AUP. I’ve had folks lease a /24 and try some dirt with it, only for IPXO to pull the route within hours. Far faster than I could have responded.As an ip holder I don’t want my resources being abused and added to blocklists so this is important to me. I do indeed plan on taking them off the market for my own use as my IPv4 usage needs increase over time. Until then, leasing them was a way to be able to justify the money spent acquiring some blocks before I got entirely frozen out forever by the hyperscalers and giant companies of the world eating practically every large block they could get their hands on.It’s future proofing my digital sovereignty. IPv4 scarcity is used by the AWS of the world to reduce competition and choice.Geolocation is such a stupid game as it is. I’m in strong support for anything that makes it even more obviously worthless. It’s been gamed by those with the skills and access since it first existed. The internet would be a better place without it.The Whois database stuff is actually a decent point, and I’m working on some ways to automate RIR registration this weekend as chance has it.From time to time I do indeed check where my blocks get advertised and utilized. One /22 right now is being used by a broadband ISP in Europe - and via nmap, traceroute, and BGP looking glass it appears to be legitimate, or at least quite well faked. The other blocks are colo and dedicated server providers competing with AWS/GCP/etc. Who knows what those customers are doing with them - probably a mix of good and bad like everything on the Internet. Functioning as-intended imo. If I'm helping reduce the need for CGNAT and helping a small company stand up to the giant tech conglomerates eating the world I'm calling it a job well done.

_zoltan_: I agree with 100% also as an IP space owner.

BLKNSLVR: I have my own system of IP reputation whereby if an IP address hits one of my systems with some probe or scan that I didn't ask for, then it's blocked for 12 months.https://github.com/UninvitedActivity/UninvitedActivity

Latty: My first thought is that with CGNAT ever more present, this kind of approach seems like it'll have a lot of collateral damage.

ACCount37: Good. GeoIP should be dead, and "IP reputation" should be meaningless garbage.

observationist: IP Reputation is only as meaningful as the duration of ownership. If it's the same owner for years, then reputation is meaningful, and that should count; if it changes hands every 6 hours being assigned to VPS clients or whatnot, then make the reputation stick to the /24 owner, and so on, with varying degrees of scope and duration, so that the responsible party - the shady companies renting their IPs to bad people - actually have their reputations stick. Then block the /24 or larger subnets, or aggressively block all ranges owned by the company, isolating them and their clients, good and bad.That sort of pressure can work. But then you risk brigading and activist fueled social media mobs and that's definitely no way to run the internet.

kevin_thibedeau: I perma-ban any /16 that hits fail2ban 100+ times. That cuts down dramatically on the attacks from the usual suspects.

BLKNSLVR: I haven't manually reviewed my lists for a while, but I did similar checks for X IP addresses detected from within a /24 block to determine whether I should just block the whole /24.Manual reviewing like this also helped me find a bunch of organisations that just probe the entire IPv4 range on a regular basis, trying to map it for 'security' purposes. Fuck them, blocked!P.S. I wholeheartedly support your choice of blocking for your reasons.

abofh: For people that implement it there's less than three people who use it, or agencies supporting it

BLKNSLVR: Yeah, my setup is purely for my own security reasons and interests, so there's very little downside to my scorched earth approach.I do, however, think that if there was a more widespread scorched earth approach then the issues like those mentioned in the article would be much less common.

BLKNSLVR: Sounds like making IPv6 more commonly used is part of the solution.Reduce the importance of IPv4 and the stranglehold of big conglomerates is forcibly relaxed (in this context at least).

paulddraper: How do you protect against DDoS?

kees99: > bunch of organisations that just probe the entire IPv4 range on a regular basisYep, #1 source of junk traffic, in my experience. I set those prefixes go right into nullroute on every server I set up:https://raw.githubusercontent.com/UninvitedActivity/Uninvite...#2 are IP ranges of Azure, DO, OVH, vultr, etc... A bit harder to block those outright.

paulddraper: How often do you ask for probes or scans?

jimz: I'm sure that it's real nice to have the lack of IPs be a problem that only tangentially affect one's daily experience but try speaking to someone who lives in a jurisdiction that is de facto independent but because of a frozen conflict or some sort of political dispute that predates their birth can neither be assigned a TLD nor be a member of an RIR. There's a giant first mover advantage and the system devised to dish out IPv4 subnets is essentially a cartel. The secondary markets is the rational economic response in the face of a market that is monopolistic, poorly designed, and acts as an absolute gatekeeper to something that's fundamental to life in modern times.The fact is that just because states and police really wish that 1 IP = 1 person but in reality that's hardly true. Residential and non-residential IPs are not really different. The resource is misallocated and what else does anyone expect? If investigations into actual criminal activity is solely based on IP addresses then it has always been one that is done incompetently. Sorry that the heuristic most convenient to the state isn't actually that great for what the state appropriated it to do. Whose fault is that? IP Geolocation is a massive backdoor whose purported efficacy has been used for geofencing warrants that basically make a mockery out of probable cause. It is also used for no good reason to help authoritarian nations and in the name of jingoism ends up inconveniencing people at the very least. My father spends 3-5 months out of the year in China and while there, he can't access his mortgage company and can't call them, can't renew his vehicle registration, can't check his gmail, and can't even purchase, but can nevertheless run, Turbotax. He's American, and there are hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas that find themselves in this awkward spot because of overreliance on one bad heuristic. So I have to pay his mortgage until he returns, every year for months, and also essentially while imitating him take care of a bunch of quotidian things that he can certainly do himself but since it's hard to teach a 65 year old man how to hop the GFW reliably, I have to go through this rigamarole. Imagine if I didn't have some cash set aside, or that I haven't paid for my own dwelling already. It certainly doesn't stop state actors from attacking when they want, but it sure makes it easy to pretend like you did something meaningful while in reality all you've done is inconvenienced your own customers. The system is broken, lamenting that fact isn't a good look.The marketplace, in fact, is hardly a mess. It has competition, it has decentralized regulatory features, do you prefer all such deals go through say LET's massive thread on it instead? https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/160162/aio-ip-related-ipv4...

lxgr: Sounds like a great idea until you ever try to connect to your own servers from a network with spammy neighbors.

kees99: You really have to look at traffic yourself (with a lot of help from automation/scripts, of course). Just choosing some one method and calling it good, will only make things worse in the long run.One example from last year: all of servers I manage suddenly started to get a lot of port 443 traffic from random /24s, few at a time. Not quite a flood, but enough to have CPU load rise a bit.Weird thing - those addresses looked like totally normal residential blocks, reputation is fine, etc. After digging deeper, found that whole /24 start at once, all 256 IPs, inlcluding .0 and .255 are used, and distribution between is pretty even. And they all send single SYNs, never a retransmit, never an ACK. Turned out, it wasn't that net that was attacking me. It was somebody using my servers as a puny x7 amplification to attack them!

kees99: Back in the day - port knocking was a perfect fit for this eventuality.Nowadays, wireguard would probably be a better choice.(both of above of course assume one is to do a sensible thing and add "perma-bans" a bit lower in firewall rules, below "established" and "port-knock")

BLKNSLVR: IRL?

BLKNSLVR: Good network admins have contingencies for contingencies for contingencies.

kees99: If more than a few come in [...] IPXO pull[s] the route within hoursNot sure that works all that great. From what I'm seeing on my servers, networks having IPXO, IPBROKER, and PREFIXBROKER keywords, are fairly common source of junk traffic.

ronsor: > can accept that as the cost of security sometimesAnd corporate IT wonders why employees are always circumventing "security policies"...

gzread: What's the purpose of blocking them, anyway? Is it to make you feel good? To clean up logs? To reduce spam? With the residential proxy industry - which, I note, is directly boosted by such blocking practices and funnels money into organized crime - IPs don't mean a whole lot to those who can pay.

lxgr: In such a world you can say goodbye to any kind of free Wi-Fi, anonymous proxy etc., since all it would take to burn an IP for a year is to run a port scan from it, so nobody would risk letting you use theirs.Fortunately, real network admins are smarter than that.

BLKNSLVR: Pretty much. I think there's also a responsibility on the part of the network owner to restrict obviously malicious traffic. Allow anonymous people to connect to your network and then perform port scans? I don't really want any traffic from your network then.Yes, there are less scorched-earth ways of looking at this, but this works for me.As always, any of this stuff is heavily context specific. Like you said: network admins need to be smart, need to adapt, need to know their own contexts.

BLKNSLVR: Additional explanation: this is primarily a personal setup.There would be a lot of refinement and contingencies to implement something like this for corporate / business.Having said that, I still exist on the ruthless side of blocking equation. I'd generally prefer some kind of small allow list than a gigantic block list, but this is how it's (d)evolved.

cortesoft: How is this better than blocking after a certain quantity in a range of time instead?Single queries should never be harmful to something openly accessible. DOS is the only real risk, and blocking after a certain level of traffic solves that problem much better with less possibility of a false positive, and no risk to your infrastructure, either.

gzread: Temporary blocks if and when you are actually being DDoSed, presumably?

gzread: CGNAT? That's definitely not true. There are whole towns that have to share one IP address. They're mostly in the third world.

gzread: Do you feel coffee shop WiFi should require you to scan your passport to connect, or that it shouldn't exist at all?

gzread: acidvegas is a pretty shady guy himself, running an IRC spam network pretty much in broad daylight. I don't know what to make of this connection, except he probably has a reason for posting this that's slightly more nefarious than sharing some interesting knowledge.

ackbar03: this guy most dangerous motherf* man, so edgy, what do you expect

Gigachad: If you actually wanted your site or service to be accessible you’d run in to issues immediately since once IP would have cycled between hundreds of homes in a year.IP based bans have long been obsolete.

gnabgib: No, no they haven't. A bad behaving network still has to answer to 2-3 bad IPs, and if it doesn't.. it's obsolete.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47246044

9cb14c1ec0: Banning IP leasing would concentrate power in the hands of those who have large IP blocks. Makes one wonder what the real motivation behind this post is.

zbentley: I mean…not curtailing leasing concentrates power with sketchy rent seekers and empowers the enterprises which use them (many of which range from “sketchy” to “evil and criminal”).So I guess I’m having trouble envisioning a world without IP leasing that’s materially worse than the one we have.

tptacek: You say this, about AWS using IPv4 scarcity for lock-in, but IPv4 prices have been falling for years.If you want to buy space and auction it off to lessors, more power to you. I don't think there needs to be a moral dimension to it one way or the other. The RIR system was also not good.

TZubiri: Have you tried getting an ipblock from a RIR and failed? they seem widely available if you justify it and at a reasonable price. If not, you can always go to a host and buy at a smaller fraction...

TZubiri: It's like selling shell companies, or buying passports.This extends to IP proxies and yes VPNs. The issue with the latter is that they psyop some genuine users into using the tech for dumb reasons like less gaming latency so that they have plausible deniability

johncolanduoni: Large DDoS botnets will have hundreds of thousands of return-path-capable IP addresses. Your temporary blocks will have to be very sensitive (i.e. trigger on a relatively small number of requests within the time window) for an application-level DDoS to be usefully mitigated.

sjtgraham: > The "exhaustion" isn't a technical crisis. It's a landlord problem.> These aren't niche services. They are the backbone of how major VPN and proxy providers operate.> This isn't datacenter IP space being labeled as residential — it's actual ISP networks being leveraged as proxy pipesThe "this isn't X, it's Y" construction is a bright red tell for AI slop. Posting AI slop is just bad manners.

pigggg: Renting /24s by the hour is like a motel room rented by the hour. You know some shit is going on in there.

pigggg: My biggest issue with IP brokers is how they'll avoid taking any responsibility for their customers action. A fair amount of bullet proof hosters (and we're talking malware distribution, botnet c2s, ransomware c2s, proxy/scanning) get their space from brokers. When you engage with the brokers they say go talk to the transit providers - and because the bullet proof guys can switch off to another transit provider easily they maintain connectivity/continue to operate. Super common in Europe where most of this goes on and they have a super plentiful transit market - but they are still rolling with the same set of IPs they get from these brokers (and one in particular).

thenthenthen: The geoip blocking is so horrible. I cant do anything when in China… even other Asian countries are blocked by my services at home.

perching_aix: Not OP, but the latter sounds pretty good actually, yeah. Never understood the free WiFi craze anyways. Just use cellular?

gzread: And you should require your passport to get one of those?

ipdashc: Not all of us have cell plans with hotspots ($$$), hotspots often have data caps, cell is often slower or congested, and there are some areas without cell signal. It's also kind of silly from a wider perspective to shove everyone onto the cellular network when most businesses have perfectly decent fiber internet nowadays.Sure, I'm usually on hotspot, but I personally appreciate when businesses have wifi. Either way, there are always going to be shared networks somewhere.

efilife: Also, the "why it matters" and bullet lists that directly follow it. But I think this post was hand written to some extent then fed to AI for "polishing it up"

miyuru: In my servers I dont have IPv4 at all, just IPv6 only.On the plus side, it does not waste CPU cycles used to block unwanted IPv4 traffic.

dsl: > concentrate power in the hands of those who have large IP blocksWho do you think is doing the leasing? People who have no IP space?

hananova: I bet if residential proxy ips were added to blocklists en masse that those ISPs would rather quickly clean up their network.

oarsinsync: > Have you tried getting an ipblock from a RIR and failed? they seem widely available if you justify it and at a reasonable priceRIPE wont "sell" me an IP block, no matter how reasonable a price I offer. RIPE will gladly let me pay them LIR annual membership dues for 2 years before they consider allocating me a /24 (based on current waiting list times)

sandworm101: If residential IPs were blocked, cutting off innocent users from services as IPs rotate, customers would bring lawsuits against ISPs and cell providers. Blocked IPs would have to be parked. Impacted users would rush to VPNs and other privacy tools, damaging the ad industry that is the backbone of most big tech. Everyone would rather deal with today's problems than that chaos.

lxgr: This is how you get really annoying restrictions on public networks, because some harmless traffic will inevitably be miscategorized by an overeager firewall/DPI system.I’m not saying that there should be zero consequences for allowing bad traffic from your network, but there’s a balance, and I would hate a world in which your policy were more common.Arguably we are already partially living in that world, as some companies are already blanket-banning entire countries, VPNs etc., rather than coming up with more fine-grained strategies or improving their authentication systems to make brute force login attempts harder. It’s incredibly annoying.

BLKNSLVR: Do you have two middle initials, both starting with d?

perching_aix: ID card you mean. Yes, and we already do.

xunairah: sourcing crises, industry is currently split into two camps: The 'Dark' Supply Chain: SDKs hidden in flashlight apps, cracked IoT devices (Kimwolf), and malware. The user has no idea they are a proxy. This is unsustainable and, frankly, unethical. The 'Ethical' Supply Chain: Bandwidth sharing apps (like Honeygain, Pawns, etc.) where the user knowingly installs the software in exchange for payment. The problem is that Camp #1 is cheaper to run, so it floods the market with 'cheap residential IPs.' Camp #2 requires paying the end-user, which raises the floor price. Until buyers stop chasing the absolute lowest price per GB, the incentive for 'malware proxies' remains. The solution isn't just router-level blocking (which creates false positives for legitimate P2P), but transparency in sourcing. If a provider can't tell you how they acquired the IP, it's likely stolen.

Borg3: Haha, nice, I run something similar.. But more manualy managed and I put those bans pernametly. Currneltly, there are 1360 blocks in drop list and growing. I never really remove them, because even those leased blocks move from one spam/abuse operator to another, so no big loss.And indeed, if people would fight w/ spam/abuse better and more aggresivly, the problem would be much smaller. I dont care anymore, In my opinion Internet is done. Time to start building overlay networks with services for good guys...

pigggg: There are "live" residential proxy IP lists you can purchase today from a variety of companies. Various companies defending use them as an additional data point when making a call to throw a captcha or block.ISPs have been fairly silent on the topic (it is a hot topic for many of them due to the kimwolf botnet leveraging resiproxies to function and launching attacks). In many cases, being a resiproxy is a violation of the TOS - but they struggle with enforcement and how to do customer engagement given that most resiproxies are loaded without the end user knowing. So you have an educational problem - how does an end user figure out how to remove it.Some ISPs could null the resiproxy c2 infra - and a few have played in that space.Home router vendors could play their part and notify users exactly which device is connecting out and give them an option to isolate, etc.

miki123211: > IRC spam networkWhy is anybody still doing IRC spam in 2026? Is there still any profit in doing that? One would think that all the remaining IRC users are highly technical and unlikely to fall for it anyway.

Mindwipe: I hate to break it to you but services have been routinely blocking residential IPs associated with being part of VPN endpoints for the better part of a decade now. Akamai will even sell you (granted they are just reselling another vendors product) a database to do this.

nubinetwork: > When you can pay to delist an IP from every major spam blacklist, those blacklists stop being useful.Ohhh.... is that why I'm broke? /s

miki123211: What we should actually be doing is WiFi using SIM cards as authentication.Have it count against your data cap (but make it much cheaper than cellular data). Pay part of that revenue to hotspot-owning businesses. If something bad happens, use the logs that telecoms are already required to keep.It's very strange to me that we don't have something like this already.

ting0: This is an AI generated article.

kees99: That helps a bit, true.But not that much, unfortunately. Those same "cYbeRseCUrITy" orgs also ingest SSL transparency logs, resolve A and AAAA for all the names in the cert, then turn around and start scanning those.In my experience it takes only about an hour from getting an SSL certificate to junk traffic to start coming in, even for IPv6-only servers.Small percentage of that, could be attributed directly, based on "BitSightBot", "CMS-Checker", "Netcraft Web Server Survey", "Cortex-Xpans" and similar keywords in user-agent. And puprely based on timing, there is a lot more of that stuff where scanners try and blend in.

JasonADrury: You've also got the fugitive neo-Nazi weev, who now hides in the Russian-backed separatist region of Transnistria as an admin on his IRC.Not to mention the ransomware guy who is again being sought by Interpol, also an op on acidvegas's IRC.irc.supernets.org is truly one of the shadiest places on the internet. I wouldn't connect even over Tor.

gzread: Oh I've been there. If he doesn't like you he spams you with "you just joined a channel" protocol messages until your client crashes from being in too many channels - most clients don't survive that. I can't fault the ingenuity.

gzread: So how does your other plan solve that?

47282847: I thought these days one can go directly to the RIR in case neither LIR nor the IP end-user acts on repeated/ongoing abuse? With the ongoing tension between central policy enforcement mechanisms vs. net/jurisdictional neutrality…

akerl_: > customers would bring lawsuits against ISPs and cell providersWhat would the case be against ISPs here?

malklera: Are these problems we want to fix?A direct example of this is the situation of Spain and soccer.

_notdan_: This is absolutely unbelievable.I cant believe weev has admin on supernets and I dont, wtf.

JasonADrury: I've read on Brian Krebs that you and Sergio Gor are both russian. I don't think you'll have difficulty getting ops

drnick1: > We're talking about paying to get IPs delisted from spam blacklists, choosing arbitrary geolocations with no validation, buying "unattributable" white-labeled address space, and renting residential IPs that make traffic look like it's coming from someone's house.Sounds pretty good from a privacy point of view, and a natural response to big tech and governments trying to fingerprint and track everyone.

xnyan: Anything important requires wireguard, you can use that on any personal device. For situations like plex from the hotel TV on vacation, I have a workflow that lets me quickly whitelist a client with my firewall specially for access to plex.

paulddraper: Like most people, I have one middle initial.

BLKNSLVR: Apologies, bad joke. I thought the context was good enough.

sandworm101: Failure to provide the contracted service. If you pay for internet, but they aasign you an IP that is already blacklisted, you are not getting internet.

akerl_: I don’t see any way for that to work out.Your ISP is not responsible for ensuring that the connection they give you works to access any particular sites (see, for example, all the sites that already implement geo-fencing to block or alter the experience based on country of origin).

lxgr: Not everything "requires" Wireguard. Wireguard is great, and I use it myself for many things, but it's totally fine to expose some services to the public Internet.

johncolanduoni: Once an IP in a botnet attacks someone, it ends up on a blocklist and can’t attack anyone else who uses that blocklist. This is a big part of Cloudflare’s DDoS model: if you attack one CF property (with non-volumetric DDoS) you will not be able to attack any others with the same bot for an extended period. This makes attacks to CF properties limited in scope and way more costly, because you have to essentially “burn” IP addresses after sending relatively little traffic.

gzread: How long does it take for a whole major ISP, say Verizon, to get on your blocklist?

gzread: So if I drive my Toyota to the corner store and they tell me to go away, I'm not welcome, I should sue Toyota for failing to get me to the store?

sandworm101: And if the blacklist is on the upstream provider? So you literally cannot send packets beyond your residential ISP? Have fun surfing the comcast homepage.

akerl_: It’s not clear what you’re trying to say. Nobody’s arguing that 3rd parties blocking ASs, ISPs, regions, etc is fun for the people who get blocked.But that doesn’t somehow create a civil case against your ISP for not acting in response to the 3rd party action.

johncolanduoni: Considering nobody blocks the entirety of Verizon, apparently a long time. You can act like this is some insane plan, but it’s happening all the time and while it can lead to annoyance for end users the internet chugs on. Which it wouldn’t if there was no way to mitigate DDoS other than rate limits.

_notdan_: Мы все тут друзья!

TZubiri: I was aware of the yearly membership (600$/yr in my RIR), and that they are on a per request basis where you have to demonstrate that you will put those IPs to the use and benefit of the general public, so you need to talk about your users basically, and if you are B2B you need to talk about your client's users.But in my RIR I don't think there's a 2 year minimum.Regarding IPv6 blocks do those require a 2 year membership as well? They are probably easier to get.