sparrowfall.nz

Brazilian bombardment

I believe that the Internet should be open and free, whatever "open and free" means today. I'm happy to see people from around the world accessing my web pages.

What I'm not happy about is those that bombard this server with relentless hits. Over the last few days I've been bombarded by requests from Brazilian IP addresses. Not just a few but, hundreds. Each day a different Brazilian subnet starts up an attack with dozens (if not hundreds) of IP's with that particular subnet hitting my firewall at intervals spaced out enough as to avoid the rate limits set on the firewall for various exposed ports.

Attacks from this country mostly target port 443 (https). I have so far blocked the following subnets.

I'm sure I will be blocking more subnets from Brazil in the coming days. Also, it will get to a point where a geo-block will be easier to apply thus denying everyone from Brazil access to this server. Yeah, the Internet should be free and open but, not for those that abuse it! I know that Brazil is one of the most attacked countries in the Internet world and possibly they have compromised machines in these subnets but hey, surely someone there must notice all these machines spewing traffic to their target(s). Then again, maybe not.

Maybe this traffic is AI slop scrapers but I very much doubt this. I would assume an AI scraper would not repeat hitting a server so much but I could be wrong about that.

The irony about all this is that for geo-blocking, one would assume that China and Russia might be first that come to mind for blocking, not Brazil.

Date posted: 07/02/2026

email: blog [AT] [this domain]