> Russian IP addresses are still trying to send email in the name of my domain for some stupid reason
For what it's worth, I've started seeing cybersecurity insurers requiring riders and extra payments if you don't block Russian IPs.
But there are big problems with mapping from IPs to countries. My IPv6 is detected as Russian, though it is London-located tunnel exit point and I'm in the Netherlands.
If your HE tunnelbroker account's country is set to Russia, you'll show up as from Russia for Google since HE publishes a geofeed of ip range -> user account country for them.[1] You should be able to change it on the settings page.[2]
If that's not it, you an see which database maps your IPv6 range to Russia and contact them to ask them to change it.[3]
Of course, if you have accounts with a Russian addresses, then things will revert.
[1] https://tunnelbroker.net/export/google
If it is a tunnel, then it might have been used by someone else before.
Those "London oblast" jokes don't come from nowhere.
Sounds like an issue with an outdated locally hosted IP2 Location database.
Google thinks it is in Russia too. And Cloudflare thinks the same.
If it's Hurricane Electrics tunnel I've had similiar issues, I think they use Russian blocks for their IPv6 tunnel since the abuse potential is so high and they don't want to deal with it so they just bundle all their shit with Russia and move on.
maybe you actually have a MITM proxy stealing all of your traffic and keystrokes
Sounds more like IP isn't a reliable factor to determine location. Not that this would be bad though.
Ive got a server hosting a number of things, amd monitoring setup for a lot of stats. Got tired of seeing blips because various countries were beating on my server, not a DoS, but enough requests to notice, and sometimes generate an alert. I blocked 7 countries, in full, and the impact was fantastic. No more 2gb of logs generated every day by countries that have no business accessing my server.
Unless you own a global business, i see no reason to even allow other countries access. The potential for attacks is too great, especially from some very specific countries.
I'm the CTO of a US-based insurance company. Apart from some reinsurers in London and Bermuda, and a couple contractors in Canada, we don't do business outside the US. We've blocked all countries except those, and it has cut down massively on the folks attacking us.
Lots of companies do this on their websites now using cloud flare or something similar. It’s practical. Still it’s frustrating as a user when you’re traveling over in Europe and can’t access your accounts to pay bills or whatnot.
Next time I travel overseas I'll have a VPN ready.
My bank had some technical problem that prevented access from overseas last time I traveled and I couldn't access my account (which was extremely inconvenient).
Most banks that will work with. For what ever reason the bank I now use knows most vpn providers and completely blocks all traffic from them so using a vpn is not an option either. The “vpn” I’ll have to use is tunneling back to my home ip. It’s actually quite frustrating.
Commercial VPNs are often blocked too. I found a p2p vpn to my home network + ssh socks5 proxy to work well.
Have you considered the additional cost of making it harder for your customers to do business with you, as well as the limited visibility that you set up for attacks that may become multi-stage in nature later?
You never see or collect the information by blocking everything at the outset.
In a world where you can proxy past these blocks fairly trivially, that's information you don't have for attribution later.
Defense in depth, or layered defenses are a best approach, but not if they blind you equally.
As someone who has whitelisted only US IP address space for my employer and blocked everything else I can attest that is DRASTICALLY reduces hostile traffic to us. I have an RDP honeypot that was blocking dozens of IPs every day before the whitelist and now it blocks 1 or 2 a day.
Kinda similar, but when I looked at the finances, I was surprised by how much money we're getting from places like the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, and the Emirates.
> I blocked 7 countries
Russia, China, Nigeria, Romania, North Korea, Iran and Belarus [1]?
[1] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-04-10-world-first-cybercrime-...
How/why did you pick these 7?
Using your link: Ukraine, USA, UK, Brazil, & India all rank higher than Iran and Belarus. US & Ukraine rank higher than Nigeria and Romania.
We (a US org) block all countries listed on the OFAC list
https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-inf...
Those countries likely have a higher chance of real traffic as well. If I’m doing business in Nigeria then obviously I can’t block it even if it ranks high on the threat level.
Yes, obviously you don't block the countries you plan to do business with. I got that much.
It probably makes sense to leave the US out of the list, assuming the CableNinja is in North America.
The rest seems pretty arbitrarily chosen, though. JumpCrisscross gave no additional context to why they left out Ukraine, Brazil, India, UK, when picking countries from the list they linked. They have higher cybercrime index ranks.
Whether they have a higher chance of "real" traffic is highly dependent on the business in question.
I'm sure there is some amount of thought behind the choice, beyond just using the index, which is why I'm asking.
Let me throw out a guess: Ukraine is a wartime ally, Brazil is the seventh largest country in the world, India is the first, and the UK speaks English and has a lot of connections to USA.
They're each also popular IT outsourcing destinations who aren't sanctioned. You may not do business in Ukraine or Brazil, but chances are one of your customers or contractors do, and blocking those IPs isn't usually in the first or second swipe. (If you're blocking the UK and India, you're probably blocking all foreign IPs.)
Romania!? I did a double-take, as it is a member of the European Union. I would think if their cyber-reputation was so terrible, there would be pressure from inside the EU to fix it.
They’re a small economy with lots of hostile traffic, so while in the EU and not sanctioned like the rest of the bunch, I’ve commonly seen them on the chopping block.
Pretty close tbh. Sub romania for brazil, and nigeria, for... i dont remember right now
just close the tcp sockets and you wont even notice them trying to connect and failing
do you also log everyone who looks at your house? it's a self inflicted problem
At least in the case of VPS my experience has been 99% failed ssh attempts. I just use nftables to rate limit those to 2 failed attempts per minute. Log size is quite modest and can easily filter out failed attempts when viewing.
Ok but you can’t block someone else using their own IPs to send email.
If you set DMARC to report, you’ll get notices from remote email systems when they receive noncompliant emails with your domain in the Envelope From field. Those reports are where you’ll see Russian IP addresses show up when they are trying to spoof your emails.
But there is no way to block them because neither the senders nor receivers are on your infrastructure. The best you can do is set a reject DMARC policy and hope everyone follows it.