- This topic is empty.
-
Posts
-
Because I was the recent victim of a hacking I’m thinking about just blocking IP’s from entire countries that are known for hacking so they can’t even get to my adult WordPress blogs. There is a WP plugin I found called “IP Geo Block” that apparently makes it easy to do this.
Becuse all my blogs are all in English I highly doubt anyone from Russia or China will end up joining a gay porn site I promote from my affiliate links, so why not just block them from my sites all together and give me one less thing to worry about? Yes, I know hacking can happen from North America or “safe” countries but when I look at the countries Wordfence is catching for “failed login attempts” they’re all from the same handful of countries who I seriously doubt will ever make me one cent.
So do any of you block entire countries from your blogs and if so how do you do it? Are there other issues with this idea I’m not aware of?
Also, do you know of any good and up to date hit lists of countries known for the most hacking attempts?
I block countries where gay folks are killed for being gay. I don’t need someone dying because they viewed my site.
Iran
Iraq
Mauritania
Nigeria
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Somalia
Sudan
YemenAnd I disable geo features in countries that have laws against being gay (but where the penalty is less than death).
Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Botswana, Brunei Darussalam, Burundi, Cameroon, Comoros, Cook Islands, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Lithuania, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Morocco, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Russian Federation, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Syrian Arab Republic, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Zambia, Zimbabwe
That’s a crazy long list!
Long??????? Hell, you just listed places I didn’t even know existed!
Excellent post Foong. I was just thinking about blocking Russia and China since that’s where most of the hack attacks come from but you’re right, there are many other countries that should be banned for other reasons.
Just curious… how are you banning the countries on your sites?
IMHO, the best option is MaxMind’s GeoIP Lite2. It’s free and quite accurate. You have your host install it. A proper install will check for updates regularly, so the data doesn’t get out-of-date. You can choose either the country database or the city database. The city database gives a lot more detail on location, the country database would have less of an impact on site/server performance. If you want to be prepared for things like blocking Utah (if they pass the bill that’s going through their legislature that allows people to sue porn sites), then choose the City database.
Then in .htaccess you tell Apache to load the database, and which fields you want to use in that database. In my case I have the City database installed and if I just want to do country-level blocking it looks like this…
MaxMindDBEnable On
MaxMindDBFile CITY_DB /usr/local/share/GeoIP/GeoLite2-City.mmdb
MaxMindDBEnv MMDB_COUNTRY_CODE CITY_DB/country/iso_code
That tells Apache to map the country ISO code to the Apache environmental variable MMDB_COUNTRY_CODE. (You can map it to any variable you like). On sites where I do more intensive geo tracking, I load A LOT more variables than that.
Then you use that variable to do the block, which would look like this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{ENV:MMDB_COUNTRY_CODE} ^(MR|SD|NG|YE|SA|QA|SO|IR|IQ)$
RewriteRule ^.*$ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_penalty_for_homosexuality [R=302,NC]
So I’m redirecting traffic from everywhere that has the death penalty for being gay to the the Wikipedia page on death penalties for homosexuality.
For someone like me who isn’t really big on coding any other easier to implement suggestions? Anyone try the Geo Block WP plugin I mentioned?
I generate this mod_rewrite rule using this tool, then stick in my htaccess file > htaccesstools.com/block-hitbots/
“I was the recent victim of a hacking”
How was it you got hacked and what was the exploit?
Host Gator said the hacker was able to get in through a WP blog I installed but was not using. They didn’t go into detail as to how. I don’t think it was guessing my user name or password since I always use hard to guess names. It may have been though the comments section, or maybe that blog was not updated to the latest version of WP. The hacker was somehow able to change the index.php file of every one of my WP blogs being hosted on my HG shared account.
What’s weird is that apparently no malware was installed or an attempt to screw up the surfers who visited my sites. It looks like the hacker just wanted to put his home page on all my blogs, which was just a message that said “you have been hacked” with some music playing. Strange.
Yeah, I do what Foong suggested, wouldn’t want somebody getting killed for finding my site in their history…
