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 worked in IT at a university about 15 years ago. As part of a research project I helped set up a Tor exit node. Within a few hours of it taking on traffic I was contacted by the universities IT security team. They were seeing all sorts of malicious traffic originating from that system and wanted to know what was going on. They had the system shut down immediately.