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.
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.