Autobanning Bad Requests (Part 3)

2026-10-17 Autobanning Bad Requests (Part 3) This week I've continued to improve my auto-banning setup. Links to the first two parts are in the footnotes.1,2 I came upon a GitHub repo that held a frequently updated list of abusive IP addresses.3 About a third of the addresses that I'd banned were on that list, so I figured it might help me to reject bad clients before waiting for them to make a bad request. It might also help identify bots that don't make any bad requests to my server. My main concern was that checking a massive list of IP addresses on every request would be slow, but it turns out to be negligible. It makes sense in hindsight; searching a sorted list should be fast. That list was largely sourced from AbuseIPDB.4 They also provide APIs for people like myself to report the IP addresses of abusive nodes on the Internet. As they receive more reports for an IP address, their confidence grows about how abusive it is, and therefore how aggressively to block it.Having people…