[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by KenDude

Paul,
Why do you say this? Why couldn't I take that list of IP addresses and block them on my own forum? If those are known bad zombie PCs then I don't want them hitting my site for any reason, password hacking or otherwise. Knowing their IP address would allow me to add them to the blocked list on my site. Thus, I fail to see the harm in posting the IP addresses if others wish to do something with the list. Am I missing something here?

I'm not sure how many different ways this can be said to you guys. You will spend each day, every day, adding new IPs to your .htaccess if you try to do it that way. That's would not just be time consuming, it would be ultimately fruitless. It wouldn't do the job of preventing these IPs from hacking into your account.* What you would need is a system that prevents ANY automated system from getting into your account based on known hacking behavior. Wanna guess what that system is?

Guys, the only reason you even know about this is because you got an email letting you know the attempt failed. That's really the only reason you even noticed. The same thing is happening to any account you have anywhere on the internet, and only a handful of those site are going to alert you of the suspicious behavior. It just so happens vB is small enough of a website (by comparison) that a larger group of us have noticed. But the site is doing it's job. If you're password is safe, then you're account is safe. When you do get emails that someone was blocked, you should be sighing relief, not freaking out and wondering what went wrong.

*Blocking IPs is to prevent spam on already registered accounts, which is pretty much a fruitless endevour in of itself. Spam should be block on the registration level. What these IPs are doing is trying to hack passwords for other purposes.)