I am looking for as reliable and accurate / quick means possible to add in some htaccess code to block visits to a website from countries / IPs which are not in the white listed list of countries I want to allow access for. I have looked at https://www.ip2location.com/free/visitor-blocker which seems to offer a solution - for the 4 allowed countries I want to allow access - it has created a 4.1MB htaccess file! Will this mean slow access when someone attempts to view the site? I guess using a free service like this means the data is likely nowhere near comprehensive?
Does anyone have any suggestions on a good way to allow just visitors from a few countries access to a website?
It sounds like the service you used basically tried tried to brute force the blacklist. If you look into the htaccess file I'm sure you will be a long list of hard coded IP blocks.
In my opinion this is a terrible way to handle a geographic blacklist. To your original question - there is no "most reliable, most accurate, and quickest" method. Those are separate categories and you will need to preference one over the next.
For performance you could consider blacklisting at the routing level / dns server / proxy. This obviously isn't going to be the quickest way in terms of performance. There are Apache Modules that exist that allow you to use a local database to compare the incoming IP address with a list of known IP blocks from the blacklisted country. One of the main issues with this is that you need to constantly update your database to take in new IP blocks.
In my opinion the "best" method to do this is a simple redirect at the application layer using server side code. There exists several geographic API's where you can send in the IP or Hostname and get back a country of origin. An example:
$xml= new SimpleXMLElement(file_get_contents('http://www.freegeoip.net/xml/{IP_or_hostname}'));
if($xml->CountryCode == "US") {
header('Location: http://www.google.com');
}
There are two ways to block a visitor in web server. One is using firewall (.htaccess etc) and another one is using server-side scripting (PHP etc).
If you are concern of the performance of the firewall option, then you can download the IP2Location LITE database from http://lite.ip2location.com and implement the database in your local server. For every connection, you query the visitor IP address and find their country. You can redirect or block them using the PHP codes. Please find the complete steps in https://www.ip2location.com/tutorials/redirect-web-visitors-by-country-using-php-and-mysql-database
There is also another option to use remote geolocation API. However, we do not suggest this method because of network latency. It will slow down all user experience due to API queries.
Related
Need some advice before starting develop some things.. I've 15 WordPress websites on different installs, and I've remote server which gets data 24/7 from those websites.
I've reached a point that I want the server to modify the websites based on his calculated data.
The things are this:
Should I allow the server the access the WP DB remotely and modify things without using WP on the circle?
Or, use WP REST API and supply some secured routes which provide data and accept data and make those changes?
My instinct is to use the WP API, but. After all its a PHP (nginx+apache) which have some limits (timeout for example) and I find it hard to run hard and long process on the WP itself.
I can divide the tasks to different levels, for example:
fetching data (simple get)
make some process on the remote server
loop and modify in small batches to another route
My concerns are that this circle require perfect match between remote server and WP API, and any change or fix on WP side brings plugins update on the websites which is not much fun.
Hope for any ideas and suggests to make it forward.
"use WP REST API and supply some secured routes which provide data and accept data and make those changes", indeed.
i don't know why timeout or another limits may cause a problem - but using API is the best way for such kind of cases. You can avoid timeout problems with some adjustments on web servers side.
Or you can increase memory, timeout limit exclusively for requested server.
f.e.
if ($_SERVER["remote_attr"]=='YOUR_MAIN_SERVER_IP') {
ini_set('max_execution_time',1000);
ini_set('memory_limit','1024M');
}
Running IIS 7, a couple of times a week I see a huge number of hits on Google Analytics from one geographical location. The sequence of urls they are viewing are clearly being generated by some algorithm so I know I'm being scraped for content. Is there any way to prevent this? So frustrated that Google doesn't just give me an IP.
There are plenty of techniques in the anti-scraping world. I'd just categorize them. If you find something missing in my answer please comment.
A. Server side filtering based on web requests
1. Blocking suspicious IP or IPs.
The blocking suspicious IPs works well but today most of scraping is done using IP proxying so for a long run it wouldn't be effective. In your case you get requests from the same IP geo location, so if you ban this IP, the scrapers will surely leverage IP proxying thus staying IP independent and undetected.
2. Using DNS level filtering
Using DNS firewall pertains to the anti-scrape measure. Shortly saying this is to set up you web service to a private domain name servers (DNS) network that will filter and prevent bad requests before they reach your server. This sophisticated measure is provided by some companies for complex website protection and you might get deeper in viewing an example of such a service.
3. Have custom script to track users' statistic and drop troublesome requests
As you've mentioned you've detected an algorithm a scraper crawls urls. Have a custom script that tracks the request urls and based on this turns on protection measures. For this you have to activate a [shell] script in IIS. Side effect might be that the system response timing will increase, slowing down your services. By the way the algorithm that you've detected might be changed thus leaving this measure off.
4. Limit requests frequency
You might set a limitation of the frequency of requests or downloadable data amount. The restrictions must be applied considering the usability for a normal user. When compared to the scraper insistent requests you might set your web service rules to drop or delay unwanted activity. Yet if scraper gets reconfigured to imitate common user behaviour (thru some nowdays well-known tools: Selenuim, Mechanize, iMacros) this measure will fail off.
5. Setting maximum session length
This measure is a good one but usually modern scrapers do perform session authentication thus cutting off session time is not that effective.
B. Browser based identification and preventing
1. Set CAPTCHAs for target pages
This is the old times technique that for most part does solve scraping issue. Yet, if your scraping opponent leverages any of anti-captcha services this protection will most likely be off.
2. Injecting JavaScript logic into web service response
JavaScript code should arrive to client (user's browser or scraping server) prior to or along with requested html content. This code functions to count and return a certain value to the target server. Based on this test the html code might be malformed or might even be not sent to the requester, thus leaving malicious scrapers off. The logic might be placed in one or more JavaScript-loadable files. This JavaScript logic might be applied not just to the whole content but also to only certain parts of site's content (ex. prices). To bypass this measure scrapers might need to turn to even more complex scraping logic (usually of JavaScript) that is highly customizable and thus costly.
C. Content based protection
1. Disguising important data as images
This method of content protection is widely used today. It does prevent scrapers to collect data. Its side effect is that the data obfuscated as images are hidden for search engine indexing, thus downgrading site's SEO. If scrapers leverage a OCR system this kind of protection is again might be bypassed.
2. Frequent page structure change
This is far effective way for scrape protection. It works not just to change elements ids and classes but the entire hierarchy. The latter involving styling restructuring thus imposing additional costs. Sure, the scraper side must adapt to a new structure if it wants to keep content scraping. Not much side effects if your service might afford it.
I have a web site that reports about each non-expected server side error on my email.
Quite often (once each 1-2 weeks) somebody launches automated tools that bombard the web site with a ton of different URLs:
sometimes they (hackers?) think my site has inside phpmyadmin hosted and they try to access vulnerable (i believe) php-pages...
sometimes they are trying to access pages that are really absent but belongs to popular CMSs
last time they tried to inject wrong ViewState...
It is clearly not search engine spiders as 100% of requests that generated errors are requests to invalid pages.
Right now they didn't do too much harm, the only one is that I need to delete a ton of server error emails (200-300)... But at some point they could probably find something.
I'm really tired of that and looking for the solution that will block such 'spiders'.
Is there anything ready to use? Any tool, dlls, etc... Or I should implement something myself?
In the 2nd case: could you please recommend the approach to implement? Should I limit amount of requests from IP per second (let's say not more than 5 requests per second and not more then 20 per minute)?
P.S. Right now my web site is written using ASP.NET 4.0.
Such bots are not likely to find any vulnerabilities in your system, if you just keep the server and software updated. They are generally just looking for low hanging fruit, i.e. systems that are not updated to fix known vulnerabilities.
You could make a bot trap to minimise such traffic. As soon as someone tries to access one of those non-existant pages that you know of, you could stop all requests from that IP address with the same browser string, for a while.
There are a couple of things what you can consider...
You can use one of the available Web Application Firewalls. It usually has set of rules and analytic engine that determine suspicious activities and react accordingly. For example in you case it can automatically block attempts to scan you site as it recognize it as a attack pattern.
More simple (but not 100% solution) approach is check referer url (referer url description in wiki) and if request was originating not from one of you page you rejected it (you probably should create httpmodule for that purpose).
And of cause you want to be sure that you site address all known security issues from OWASP TOP 10 list (OWASP TOP 10). You can find very comprehensive description how to do it for asp.net here (owasp top 10 for .net book in pdf), i also recommend to read the blog of the author of the aforementioned book: http://www.troyhunt.com/
Theres nothing you can do (reliabily) to prevent vulernability scanning, the only thing to do really is to make sure you are on top of any vulnerabilities and prevent vulernability exploitation.
If youre site is only used by a select few and in constant locations you could maybe use an IP restriction
I have a DB with user accounts information.
I've scheduled a CRON job which updates the DB with every new user data it fetches from their accounts.
I was thinking that this may cause a problem since all requests are coming from the same IP address and the server may block requests from that IP address.
Is this the case?
If so, how do I avoid being banned? should I be using a proxy?
Thanks
You get banned for suspicious (or malicious) activity.
If you are running a normal business application inside a normal company intranet you are unlikely to get banned.
Since you have access to user accounts information, you already have a lot of access to the system. The best thing to do is to ask your systems administrator, since he/she defines what constitutes suspicious/malicious activity. The systems administrator might also want to help you ensure that your database is at least as secure as the original information.
should I be using a proxy?
A proxy might disguise what you are doing - but you are still doing it. So this isn't the most ethical way of solving the problem.
Is the cron job that fetches data from this "database" on the same server? Are you fetching data for a user from a remote server using screen scraping or something?
If this is the case, you may want to set up a few different cron jobs and do it in batches. That way you reduce the amount of load on the remote server and lower the chance of wherever you are getting this data from, blocking your access.
Edit
Okay, so if you have not got permission to do scraping, obviously you are going to want to do it responsibly (no matter the site). Try gather as much data as you can from as little requests as possible, and spread them out over the course of the whole day, or even during times that a likely to be low load. I wouldn't try and use a proxy, that wouldn't really help the remote server, but it would be a pain in the ass to you.
I'm no iPhone programmer, and this might not be possible, but you could try have the individual iPhones grab the data so all the source traffic isn't from the same IP. Just an idea, otherwise just try to be a bit discrete.
Here are some tips from Jeff regarding the scraping of Stack Overflow, but I'd imagine that the rules are similar for any site.
Use GZIP requests. This is important! For example, one scraper used 120 megabytes of bandwidth in only 3,310 hits which is substantial. With basic gzip support (baked into HTTP since the 90s, and universally supported) it would have been 20 megabytes or less.
Identify yourself. Add something useful to the user-agent (ideally, a link to an URL, or something informational) so we can see your bot as something other than "generic unknown anonymous scraper."
Use the right formats. Don't scrape HTML when there is a JSON or RSS feed you could use instead. Heck, why scrape at all when you can download our cc-wiki data dump??
Be considerate. Pulling data more than every 15 minutes is questionable. If you need something more timely than that ... why not ask permission first, and make your case as to why this is a benefit to the SO community and should be allowed? Our email is linked at the bottom of every single page on every SO family site. We don't bite... hard.
Yes, you want an API. We get it. Don't rage against the machine by doing naughty things until we build it. It's in the queue.
Hi, We are developing a multi-tenant application in Asp.Net with separate Database for each tenant, in which one of the requirement is to monitor the bandwidth usage for each tenant,
i have tried to search but not found much help on the topic,we want to monitor exactly how much bandwidth is being used for each tenant while each tenant can have its own top level domain or a sub domain or a combination of both.
so what are the available options, the ones which i can think of can be
IIS Log Monitoring means a separate application which will calculate the bandwidth for each tenant.
Log Each Request and Response for a tenant from within the application and then calculate the total bandwidth usage based on that.
Use some third part components if available
So what do you think will be the best approach, also if there is any other way to do this.
Ok, here is an idea (that I have not test, leave that to you)
On global.asax
use one of this function (find the one that have a valid final size)
Application_PostRequestHandlerExecute
Application_ReleaseRequestState
and get the size that you have send with
Response.Filter.Length
No need to metion, that you get the filename of the call using the
HttpContext.Current.Request.Path
This functions called with every single request, so you can get your size and you do the rest.
Here must note, that you need first to test this idea to see if its work, and maybe improve it, and have in mine that if you have compress the pages on server the length is not the correct and maybe you need to compress it on Global.asax to have the actually lenght.
Hope this help.
Well, since the IIS logs already contain the request size and response size, it doesn't seem like too much trouble to develop a small tool to parse them and calculate the total per day/week/month/whatever.
Trying to segment traffic based on host is difficult in my experience. Instead, if you give each tenant their own IP(s) for the applications you should be able to find programs that will monitor bandwidth based on IP.
ADDITION Is the structure of IIS that you have one website to rule them all for all tenants and on login the system forks to the proper database? If so, this may create problems with respect to versioning in that all tenant's sites will all have to have exactly the same schema and would all need to be updated simultaneously when you update the application such that a schema change is required.
Another structure, which sounds like what you may have, is that each tenant has their own website like so:
tenant1_site/appvirtualdir
tenant2_site/appvirtualdir
...
Where the appvirtualdir points to the same physical path for all tenant's sites. When all clients have the same application version, they are all using literally the same code. If you have this scenario and some sort of authentication, then you will need one IP per tenant anyway because of SSL. SSL will only bind to IP and port unlike non-SSL which will bind to IP, port and host. If that were the case, then monitoring traffic based on IP will still be simpler and more accurate as it could be done at the router or via a network monitor.