Free solutions for detecting proxies

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SUMMARY

This discussion focuses on free methods for detecting proxy usage on websites, particularly in relation to suspicious traffic from IP addresses associated with major organizations like Microsoft and Google. Users have shared techniques such as analyzing network organization information, checking headers, and utilizing proxy lists. The conversation highlights the limitations of detecting all proxies and the challenges in differentiating between legitimate bots and malicious users. Tools like WhatIsMyIPAddress are recommended for IP analysis.

PREREQUISITES
  • Understanding of IP logging and analysis
  • Familiarity with network organization information
  • Knowledge of web traffic patterns and referrer spam
  • Basic skills in using online IP lookup tools
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  • Research methods for analyzing HTTP headers to identify proxies
  • Explore free proxy lists and their effectiveness in detection
  • Learn about Tor exit nodes and their implications for web security
  • Investigate techniques for mitigating referrer spam on websites
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Web developers, security analysts, and anyone managing website traffic who seeks to enhance their understanding of proxy detection and improve site security against malicious activities.

Jarfi
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For security reasons, There is an IP-logger on my website, also logging reference page. What I've noticed is repeated visitors from Beijing, Microsoft or Google INC. Also getting visits from websites like: "http://hvd-store.com/".

How can I detect a proxy without paying for some service? I've been estimating proxies from Network Organization information and by googling the IP, but I don't have any automatic mechanism that I can use to display threat-info or into the page for other admins to see, something like "detected proxy"/"Individual".

And is there a way to detect and differentiate bots, search-spiders and proxies? it's hard to be sure if the ones from Microsoft and Google INC are web-spiders or someone with bad intents.

An example of a suspicious visit logged:

Network Organization: AS16276 OVH SAS
Ref-page: http://hvd-store.com/
IP: 176.31.182.218
Location: Paris
Browser: Google Chrome

A bot that hangs around,

Network Organization: AS55967 Beijing Baidu Netcom Science and Technology Co., Ltd.
Ref-page: no ref-page
IP: 180.76.15.34
Location: Beijing
Browser: Unknown

I thought this was a spider, but it has a browser so I am led to believe it's something different:

Network Organization: AS15169 Google Inc.
Ref-page: no ref-page
IP: 66.249.93.252
Location: Mountain View
Browser: Mozilla Firefox

-Thanks in advance.
 
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It's a probability game. For instance you can find lists of Tor exit node IPs, that will give you some clue. But I can tell you from a pure computer science perspective, its just not possible to detect all proxies, even if you pay for a service. As a thought experiment, imagine someone A who calls a friend B and tells them to visit your page, and read what they find there. How do you detect anything about A from B? You don't, and digital versions of the same process will reveal nothing about A either. Download Teamviewer, and launch a browser on a remote computer to view your site. How can you tell that its being remotely invoked by Teamviewer and seen by another computer? You can't. Its really something you need to set aside to accomplish your security goals.
 
176.31.182.218 is listed as a TOR exit node.

180-76-15-34 has hostname baiduspider-180-76-15-34.crawl.baidu.com

66.249.93.252 has hostname google-proxy-66-249-93-252.google.com

If I was going to try to do this I would check headers, proxy lists, tor exits, and check for open common proxy ports and do an automated search on google like +"66.249.93.252" proxy

But Foolality is right. Can't get them all. And some proxy accesses might be legit (didn't all AOL accesses come through a proxy? don't remember).

Logging what people throw at your computer is a great way to collect exploits. I would think one could look for suspicious requests and list those IP's (but maybe that's impractical -- I'm not a security expert)
 
"hvd-store.com" turned up in my website log file today:

89.105.194.71 - - [14/Aug/2015:00:47:13 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 301 230 "http://hvd-store.com/" [/PLAIN] "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.120 Safari/537.36"
89.105.194.71 - - [14/Aug/2015:00:47:14 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3095 "http://hvd-store.com/" [/PLAIN] "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.120 Safari/537.36"

These are requests for my home page (GET /) from the IP address 89.105.194.71, which appear to be the result of clicking on a link on the home page at http://hvd-store.com/. I haven't gone to hvd-store.com to look, but I would wager strong odds that there is not actually a link to my site there. It would probably at best try to sell me something, or at worst try to infect my computer with malware. This is called "referrer spam", which tries to trick curious website owners into following the links to see who is apparently linking to their sites. It's created by bots which fetch pages from your site, inserting the spam site URL into the referrer field of the requests.

Whenever I see a new referrer in my log file, and it doesn't seem to be related to the topic of my site, I do a Google search on it to try to find out something about it, before deciding whether to click on the link. In this case I didn't find anything for "hvd-store.com" which gave any indication of what this site is actually about, which is why I didn't go there. This thread turned up on the first page of that search. :smile:

http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup gives the following information about the originating IP address:

IP: 89.105.194.71
Decimal: 1500103239
Hostname: tor-exit-readme.as24875.net
ASN: 24875
ISP: Avira B.V.
Organization: Avira B.V.
Services: http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-services
http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-services
Recently reported forum spam source. (83)

http://whatismyipaddress.com/hostname-ip gives me the following IP addresses for hvd-store.com:

Lookup Hostname: hvd-store.com
Lookup IPv4 Address: http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/208.73.210.217
Lookup IPv4 Address: http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/208.73.211.178
Lookup IPv4 Address: http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/208.73.210.200
Lookup IPv4 Address: http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/208.73.210.214

Plugging the first address back into the ip-lookup tool gives me

General IP Information
IP: 208.73.210.217
Decimal: 3494499033
Hostname: 208.73.210.217
ASN: 40034
ISP: Oversee.net
Organization: Confluence Networks
Services: None detected
Type: http://whatismyipaddress.com/broadband
Assignment: http://whatismyipaddress.com/dynamic-static
Blacklist:
Geolocation Information
Continent: North America
Country: United States
us.png

State/Region: California
City: Los Angeles
Latitude: 34.0533 (34° 3′ 11.88″ N)
Longitude: -118.2549 (118° 15′ 17.64″ W)
Postal Code: 90071
 
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