I started a company!

“What? Huh? Why?”

Those are some of the many questions I was asking myself. Simply… Looking to challenge the brain in different ways than what I’m normally doing.

How it began – In my personal time while trying to secure my own personal hosted infrastructure, I was noticing that there wasn’t an efficient or effective way to block bad threat actors (nasty hackers) on the Internet.

The typical (tedious) approach has always been:

  • I see a bad connection from IP1, therefore I must block IP1.
  • I see a bad connection from IP2, therefore I must block IP2.
  • I see a bad connection from IP3, therefore I must block IP3.
  • ….
  • Repeat until you lose all sense of sanity.
  • The problem with this approach is that you end up getting stuck in a game of whack-a-mole. Who do you think wins? Trick question – it’s not you!

    I put a different idea together – what if bad threat actors run their hacking world like a business and focus on cost optimization and automation. Novel idea right?

    How does this apply to what I do? Well if I were to run a business like theirs, I would figure out how to “copy/paste” my attacks in creative ways. To do this, I would choose a (cheap) hosting provider that has resources that I can use for my desired purposes. Once the hosting provider is identified, I’m going to figure out ways to spin up new resources in a quick manner in a different location (i.e. automation).

    New Resource + New Location = New IP Address To Attack From

    Now that I know this, let the hacking begin!

    Do you see how the game of whack-a-mole starts?

    What does my company do?

    I have a few products available now, but the one product that solves the above problem is a product called Molasses Masses.

    How does it work?

    Rather than blocking on a per-IP basis, I get all the subnets for that hosting provider that the hacker is using and then block those. The idea is that remote connections coming to my/your hosted services, should not come from other hosting providers. It should be from people like you reading this article!

    Now it’s possible that you or your business partners get caught up in the block list – no problem! You can exclude your own and/or business partner subnets from the specifically curated list of subnets that you download.

    How effective it this?

    I’ve seen a reduction of attacks of up to 90%* from all my honeypots on the Internet.

    Why would you use this?

    Got remote users that need to VPN into your organization?

    Got hosted services that should be accessed from actual users, and not random bots sitting in hosted environments?

    Then this is the product for you!

    Integrations available?

    Very simply, It’s a flat text file of curated subnets that you can use in your own policies..

    These are the supported platforms available today to consume my product:

    • Linux (shorewall)
    • Cisco – Firepower Threat Defense (FTD)
    • Fortinet – Fortigate Firewalls
    • Palo Alto Networks – PAN-OS and Prisma Access.

    Curious to test it out? 7-day free trials available.

    Use discount code MM2026 to snag a 20% discount on checkout for the first 50 customers 🙂

    * As with all things in life – your mileage may vary. You might have a different environment compared to mine which gives different results. #AntiHacking #BotMitigation #BruteForceProtection #CiscoFTD #CloudSecurity #CyberSecurity #Cybersecurity #DDoSProtection #Fortigate #Honeypot #InfoSec #IPBlocking #MolassesMasses #NetworkSecurity #PaloAltoNetworks #security #Shorewall #SubnetFiltering #SysAdmin #technology #threatIntelligence #VPNTrust #ZeroTrust
    Post-Cloudflare update

    It’s been nearly a week since I removed Cloudflare from my sites. As a quick followup, I did get a slight surge in traffic that lasted for a day or so after a bunch of bots' DNS caches expired, but they seem to have all given up after the Cloudflare “managed challenge” interstitial turned into an HTTP 401 error for them.

    🤖 89% of bot traffic = unwanted.

    Fastly’s Threat Insights Report breaks down how bad bots are skewing analytics, inflating costs & fueling attacks.

    📊 Get the full report: https://learn.fastly.com/security-threat-insights-report

    #CyberSecurity #BotMitigation #ThreatReport

    🤖 #AppTrana #Bot Management Update 🤖

    With AppTrana's latest #botmanagement enhancements, users can now define what a bot means for their application's unique context and establish custom mitigation actions based on the user's behaviour.

    Learn more about this enhancement here: https://bit.ly/3zt6fXy

    #botpolicies #webapplications #botdetection #falsepositives #botattacks #bots #botprotection #scraperbots #botmitigation #indusface

    Bot Management – User-Defined Bot Policies | Indusface blog

    Explore AppTrana's Bot Management Enhancements - User-Defined Bot Policies. Use custom policies to improve control & balance false positives through use cases.

    Indusface

    👉 Social media bots can disrupt your advertising, skew metrics, and impact interactions.

    Discover effective ways to identify and mitigate them: https://bit.ly/3X5VW5C

    #socialmediabots #badbots #socialbots #badbots #botdetection #botmitigation #botprotection #botmanagement #waap #managedservices #apptrana #indusface

    Social Media Bots - Definition, Purpose, Preventive Measures

    Social media bots, also known as social bots, are automated software programs or scripts designed to interact with users and content on social media platforms.

    Indusface

    👉 Did you know that over 40% of internet traffic is #bot traffic? 🤖

    Distinguishing between humans and bad bots is becoming increasingly difficult as attacks become more sophisticated, making it challenging to identify their true nature.

    Learn more about what #badbots are with tips to effectively identify and handle them - https://bit.ly/44R8CPp

    #maliciousbots #webapplications #cyberattacks #goodbots #botprotection #botattacks #databreaches #ddosattacks #cybersecurity #botnets #botmitigation #apptrana #indusface

    Bad Bots - What They Are & How to Handle Them | Indusface

    Bad bots are automated software programs designed to perform harmful tasks, exploiting vulnerabilities in online systems & applications for malicious purposes.

    Indusface
    Customers Speak: What Did They Say? | Indusface

    With our web application security customers like shoppers stop, TCS, HDFC and more. Listen what they are saying about our services.

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    Mobilizon의 봇 방어
    Mobilizon은 페이스북 이벤트와 비슷한 기능을 지원한다.
    당장 쓰지 않아도 봇을 꾸준히 조금씩 가입시켜두면 유용하게 작동시킬 수 있을 것이다.
    서버들을 훑어보면 봇만 계속 가입하는데, 앱 자체에는 아이피 차단이나 이메일 도메인 차단이 없다. 상단 방화벽에서만 일부 기능으로 보호 수 있는 상황.
    중재의 경우도, 이용자 목록을 많이 보거나 일괄 처리가 불가능하여, 모든 이용자를 개별 확인해야한다.
    악의를 상정해서 소프트웨어를 작성함이 어려운 과정임을 고려하면 아쉬워도 어쩔 수 없지만, 페디버스가 성장하는 상황에서 이에 대한 메인테이너 합류가 없는 많은 프로젝트의 추친력이 떨어질지도.

    #Mobilizon #fediverse #botmitigation