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Are ISPs responsible for bots having residential IPs or is this a user problem? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 16 points 2 months ago

So I work for a smaller regional ISP in the Midwest. I can definitively say every single notice we have ever received about any IP addresses on our network causing a problem has always been a compromised legitimate device on a user’s network. Most of the time it’s somebody installing a shady app on their smart TV/streaming stick.

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