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Comment by Jnr | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what you implemented.

They provide several IP blacklists. None of those seem to be false positives. You can also add custom 3rd party blocklists.

They also provide several different rulesets. It is up to you to choose which ones to use and fine tune. LLMs can be very helpful with that.

And there are 3rd party dashboards and tools that help you manage it more easily.

I use the free version as a simple WAF on multiple servers and it blocks a lot of bots. It did require some initial finetuning though.

Are there any better open source solutions?

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We had the main community blocklist and several of their pricey paid blocklists enabled in a PoC capacity. We had a lot of legitimate users end up blocked. In some cases these may have been VPN exit nodes, or users on CG-NAT, or devices on a shared network with some other compromised / bot device. I didn't get 100% of the details, just that we were inundated with support requests from real users that ended up blocked.

Given the number of residential proxies I see scraping the couple of sites I have responsibility for I don't find IP address-based blocking useful anymore. That ship has sailed.

Behavioral and client fingerprint analysis (ugh-- having to run Javascript just to view a static site) is the only way (at least until we get user "age" and identity attestation rammed down our throats).

I run an attractive site to AI scrapers and yes the IP ship has indeed sailed in favor of residential proxies. They are non-stop and could have ingested all of our content many times over every day. JA4 is useless too because they have the ability to spoof this or use a very common fingerprint like Chrome that you cannot block without blowback. These bots will only use a given IP a couple of dozen times and then use another node. They use 10s of thousands of IPs. You can tell because they will come in waves from a residential or mobile network

What kind of fingerprinting are you thinking of? JA4? I haven't found a way to do that inexpensively at our scale, but we may have to go that route - looking at CloudFront bot mitigation.

For behavioral, we have Anubis honeypot functionality turned on, but it doesn't seem to be effective for 99% of scrapers. Anubis is also running behind TLS termination, so I don't think it can do full JA4. It does have the less robust JA4H apparently, but I'm not sure how effective that will be.

Edit: Oh yeah, forgot to mention - it's almost 100% residential proxies. Primarily China Telecom and China Unicom. Unfortunately those providers are HUGE and also host a ton of legitimate users all over Asia.

> What kind of fingerprinting are you thinking of?

I'm minding a proprietary application where this is being discussed. The vendor is talking about running Javascript in the client to detect headless browsers, bots, etc. I'm guessing they're going to license something off-the-shelf. The technical specifics aren't being discussed. They're at the "wow the stakeholders" phase.

I'd like to do something ourselves but, at the size of the org I'm talking about (with virtually no in-house dev resources), COTS rules the day.

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