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Comment by arcza | Hacker News Reader

I've been blocking Hetzner, Digital Ocean, Linode, OVH and Contabo for a while. You can do this with pfBlocker NG by blocking ASNs, or UFW rules (https://blog.abctaylor.com/ufw-and-firewalld-rules-to-block-...)

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One concern with doing this as a whole is you may end up blocking legit organizations from accessing your site. If you're selling something that could be a problem.

For example, the org might be self-hosting WireGuard or another VPN solution on a cloud provider and people are connecting through that so their outgoing IP address comes from a cloud provider.

You can whitelist ranges or whatever for larger customers, but that doesn't suit every form of product or client size ofc.

A big and and not so big enterprises these days uses VPN and similar solutions with exit nodes in the cloud so such blocks essentially prevents access to your web site from a work computer.

oof. Why Hetzner?

Due to firewall logs showing DNS amplification attack attempts

Why go beyond blocking direct DNS access?

(Ideally you'd make then switch to TCP by truncating UDP responses to specific clients but that sounds like a hassle to set up so it's understandable to skip that.)

Everyone is attempting all attacks all the time from everywhere. Why not secure yourself so the attempts fail?

At that point secure would be 'offline'... It's not like botnets, "unlocker" farms and P2P doesn't originate from residential netblocks all day long.

The idea of "I just want the legitimate traffic" is a simple one, but the implementation of the idea has very little to do with "I will just block the big bad cloud!".

Securing yourself means not being vulnerable to the attacks. Who cares if you are exposed to an internet radiation banana equivalent? Why worry? You'll hurt yourself more from the worry than from the radiation.

Blocking huge IP ranges is knocking yourself half offline, and it doesn't even stop you being "attacked". I'd start blocking if and only if there is some actual problem for your server (e.g. excessive CPU or bandwidth usage), not just because big bad scary cloud.

> Who cares if you are exposed to an internet radiation banana equivalent?

Me, because i would like to read all of the syslog without meaningless noise.

Then don't log the noise. Every log gets filled with noise if you aren't careful about choosing what to log.

Nonsense. There is no log level that separates between noise and legitimate data.

Then stop trying to separate it and just acknowledge these logs are (almost?) worthless?

I think it should be reciprocal, like in the real world. If someone blocks a provider, a provider should be allowed to block back. Maybe with some automatism. So it is fair and each party has information about what is going on. Or using real guns instead of these children games in the sandbox.

So if I run a web server at home and I’m constantly attacked by AWS IPs, I shouldn’t be able to block them without myself being unable to access the lion’s share of the web hosted on AWS? Doesn’t that seem sort of extreme?

I run a web server at home, and have for decades. The constant scans is something you realize is "normal" and just ignore.

The internet is not like twitter - a block is practically bidirectional.

> I think it should be reciprocal, like in the real world. If someone blocks a provider, a provider should be allowed to block back. Maybe with some automatism. So it is fair and each party has information about what is going on. Or using real guns instead of these children games in the sandbox.

I don't think your take makes any sense whatsoever. Beyond the puerile "I'll block you too", what exactly do you hope to achieve with this nonsense?

Fewer blocks.

Can you elaborate? It sounds like puerile specious reasoning at best.

If blocking someone works in both directions, you won't block half the internet based on spurious reasoning, because you'll be blocked from half the internet based on your own spurious reasoning. You'll carefully consider who to block.

Yeah, exactly, thank you.

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