From time to time, valued visitors are banned. This happens most frequently when I am adding new “rules”. Unfortunately, sometimes the rules — especially new rules– hammer people. Those people are often at universities and research institutions. They are naturally puzzled to a rule might cover their institute. It may seem odd, but IPs at universities and research agencies often do look suspicious. I suspect the reason for this is related to the fairly transient population of students, graduate students some of whom might decide to get involved in a little “private enterprise”. Also, from point of view of security– universities often have a rather open and free-wheeling nature valuing novelty and research. But it is fairly apparent that “research” bots sometimes behave rather badly during the development stage. Bad bot behavior can be due to bugs, incomplete implementation of the design or — quite likely — an oblivious designer who doesn’t think through how their nifty new agent might affect operation of a site it hits. (Note that the oblivious designer might be an undergraduate assigned the task of writing a scraper for their course on “intro to scraping”; their priority is generally “get the assignment done in time to turn in”.)

Anyway, over the past two weeks three or so people wrote to tell me they got banned. Needless to say: I was adding new rules and some were “less than perfect”. I you all for your patience and especially thank those who write telling me the script made a mistake.

But enough of the chit-chat. Today, I want to show you just how bad it really is.
After the “more” tag, I have pasted a list of the IPs banned for connections that appear highly likely to be actual hacking. This list is limited to 15 days worth of attempts that were diagnosed as “hack” or “penetration testing” attempts. This is actually a small fraction of the bans— some bans are just “snoop”, “scrape”, or “spam” attempts. The following list is limited to connections whose “reason” for banning includes the word “hack”. (Note the “reason” is trimmed to a finite length. Some of these things violate numerous rules so the word “hack” might not appear in the reason displayed.)