I’m trying to understand the bot problem in the internet and finding more ways to defend myself. One thing that I can’t seem to understand is why most bots, scrapers and crawlers seem to have residential IPs.
- Is it that ISPs are being paid by tech-bros to assign them these IPs?
- Is it that residential devices have been hacked /contain malware that does this?
- Is it trivial for companies to assign themselves residential IPs?
- Paid volunteers are doing this for AI companies?
Or is there is some other reason for this?
Obviously this is a problem because one can rotate / cycle through residential IPs and if I aggressively block each offender in my logs permanently, then the next person assigned this IP who may be a legitimate user will be unable to access my site.
I can pay for internet in cash and the only details I gave them are fake and a random username. 4G internet isn’t even tied to the same location as I can move freely.
As I’m not bothered about doing cybercrimes I don’t bother doing that much about security though.
4G/5G cellular? So, in some ways you’re actually easier to find. Your cell gateway is connecting to a tower which is logged and includes cell strength metrics. That gets compared to other towers and via trilateralization your location is determined.
Again, going back to what I previously said: there is a path back to you even if only for either billing or connectivity purposes.
So it’s easy to find me living at home doing nothing, and hard to track a determined criminal who would just move it when doing crimes?
Yes it is easy to find you. No, it is not hard to track someone just moving it.
Time to do some crime. Let’s go to a remote location. Turns router on, does crimes, turns it off. Goes home.
IMEI. You really would make an awful criminal lol.