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 can pay for internet in cash and the only details I gave them are fake and a random username. 4G internet isn’t even tied to the same location as I can move freely.
As I’m not bothered about doing cybercrimes I don’t bother doing that much about security though.
4G/5G cellular? So, in some ways you’re actually easier to find. Your cell gateway is connecting to a tower which is logged and includes cell strength metrics. That gets compared to other towers and via trilateralization your location is determined.
Again, going back to what I previously said: there is a path back to you even if only for either billing or connectivity purposes.
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?