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According to a recent report from ZDNet, 31% of traffic is illegitimate (hackers, scrapers, spammers). The challenge as a sysadmin is to find a way to block that traffic without blocking your real users and search engines. I've searched ServerFault for "block traffic" and only found answers about specific tools (like this and this one for iptables) which doesn't give you an overview of the solutions that are out there and when to use them hence why I would like to post this question in an attempt to gather an authoritative answer on the topic.

I started diving into it and my general understanding is as follows:
-the lower in the stack you check (e.g. iptables) the better for performance (because it doesn't get processed by the application) but the more likely to block legitimate traffic (e.g. if you filter on IP and a hacker is using an access point you will end up blocking all the users that rely on the same access point).
-the higher in the stack you check (e.g. apache mod_security) the worse for performance (because every component up to that point has had to process the information) but the less likely to block legitimate traffic.

Since we're running REHL 5.6 and Ubuntu 10.04 with httpd/apache + PHP I'm not going to lie and confess that I am only interested in solutions that fit these configurations.

Q: Could you share, from experience, the tools that you're using (and why) to block illegitimate traffic to your websites?

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I'm using OSSEC to prevent illicite attacks on my websites. It checks what people are asking and if it sees a trend that someone is asking a lot files that don't exist to try and find a login page or an open config file, it will automatically block these users. It's pretty extensive. I made a blog post about it.

It's quite easy to define your own rules to block off brute force attacks. You can also use one server and multiple clients. So if one server notices an attack, it blocks it off and notifies the server of the incident.

Here's a nice post on how to block someone that generates too many 404's.

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