Ask HN: Why so many sites block traffic from Russia?

[ruslankh]

For the last couple of months, about a 1/5 of links on HN are inaccessible from Russia because site owners block this traffic. I have a suspicion that they don't even know that. Especially, when it happens on Claudflare side. That's kinda sad. And I wonder why that's happening.

[jank199x]

Too many bots.

My US East Coast VPS firewall logs are full of Russian and Ukrainian IPs. They are more numerous than Chinese, even.

I'm not sure the people behind them are all Russian and Ukrainian, though. My guess RU/UA IPs are just cheaper and easier to obtain by malicious actors.

AFAIK you better be using VPN living in Russia, anyway. Doesn't Russian govt block a ton of stuff from their side?

[ruslankh]

Great explanation, thanks! Speaking of government, the only critical things they blocked are YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. They also blocked some media in Russian, but they are basically propaganda just from other side. All media in English like NYT are freely available.

[mooiedingen]

Imho it is sad that it is happening!, However in many cases it is just a DNS level ban which has been put in place by governments.

That means in a country like mine Belgium where government controls DNS through an entity DNS-Belgium they make it act as the GFW for both incomming as outgoing traffic.

For one that knows what that means, One knows how to bypass this which is as simple as letting another provider resolve DNS...

Since i use DNS to also block a shtload of advertisements, i have built in a whole list of resolvers which i tested to check if they censor.

The one i can think of my head that doesn't block is quad9: 9.9.9.9 & 149.112.112.112 one thats simply configures the earlier mentionned ip addresses to resolve his DNS queries shall will be able to reach Russian based sites again.

For a Solution from in Russia one can look at proxies,vpns,.. but i do not know what works from there for i am stuck in this shtty country over here :(

I hope this will resolve soon, if you want me to try and help you, i am always willing to do my best, just let me know

[mike-cardwell]

For anyone else that wants to block traffic from Russia, here's how to do it with nginx: https://www.grepular.com/Blocking_Russian_IPs

[The_suffocated]

A wild guess: perhaps it was the Russian authority, not the site owners, who blocked the traffic. Collective action is usually inefficient. If something suddenly happens in a large scale, more often than not it is caused by a few influential entities.

[ruslankh]

No, Russian authorities blocked just few critical sites and they all are listed in special registry. Internet is more or less freely available in Russia. The only big things they blocked are YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. And some specific media in Russian. Media in English like WSJ, NYT are freely available.

I'm talking about Cloudflare settings or other blockers.

[bigyabai]

> I wonder why that's happening.

https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-inf...

[ruslankh]

Sure, but that happens on personal blogs and small websites. And speaking of sanctions, why does Google work perfectly fine?

[incomingpain]

There's no legitimate traffic from Russia. Geoblocking of Russia is prudent. In fact, geoblocking Russia will lead to significantly less attacks at 0 loss of legitimate traffic. Easy choice.

[verdverm]

Security

Ukraine

They are generally bad actors, not worth the effort trying to filter