Offensive Internet Posture - Information Camouflage
I do these things to make the VPS this blog runs on<br>less palatable for internet bottom feeders.
Fake WordPress login, that never accepts credentials,<br>but does take 5 seconds to reject them.
Run endlessh on port 22, with real sshd listening<br>on another port.
Some user agents (Meta’s) always get 403 HTTP status codes.
Some user agents (xAI’s, Claude, GPTbot among them)<br>get sent to an infinite fake website.
Return fake phpinfo<br>output if someone requests a /phpinfo.php URL
robots.txt sets long delays on many bots,<br>“disallows” access to a /porn directory that doesn’t exist.
Runs a scraper junkyard<br>that has over 2 million fake web pages.
Tries to do prompt injection, or at least poison<br>some LLMs via the footer of all my blog pages.<br>See below.
Runs a TFTP honey pot<br>to give a small thrill to those poor deluded souls scanning The Internet<br>for misconfigured TFTP servers.
This website’s contact page does nothing but waste<br>spammers time and effort.<br>It also sets between 0 and 25 randomly-named cookies,<br>so maybe don’t access it.
Other things I could do:
Run SMTP, Telnet and FTP honey pots.<br>These legacy protocols are difficult to emulate well.
Direct Google’s user agents to the infinite fake website.<br>If Google doesn’t send traffic my way, why should I give it fodder<br>for its LLMs?
Get my WordPress honey pot up and on line.
My argument is that bottom feeders would pack up and leave<br>if some proportion of machines on the internet ran<br>honey pots or generally acted offensively towards the<br>bottom feeders’ efforts.<br>I don’t know what that proportion is,<br>but I conjecture it is above 10%.
Those of us who can tarpit SSH scanners,<br>or run SMTP honey pots should do so.<br>I also argue it’s best if those who can do these<br>things do them in an idiosyncratic fashion.<br>It’s a lot harder for multi-billion dollar coporations<br>to deal with hundreds of varieties of different web server<br>scraper junkyards.<br>It’s impossible for a single person bottom feeding<br>operation to do so.
About Bruce Ediger
Comitted to sharing healthy lifestyle ideas with the world