Nginx Bad Bot Blocker

223 (and growing) Nginx rules to block bad bots.

Bad bots are defined as:

• E-mail harvesters
• Content scrapers
• Spam bots
• Vulnerability scanners
• Aggressive bots that provide little value
• Bots linked to viruses or malware
• Government surveillance bots
• Chinese search engine Baidu
• Spamhaus IP list block

Baidu

Unless your website is written in Chinese, you probably don't get any traffic from them. They mostly just waste bandwidth and consume resources.

Bots Are Liars

Bots try to make themselves look like other software by disguising their useragent. Their useragents may look harmless, perfectly legitimate even. For example, "^Java" but according to Project Honeypot, it's actually one of the most dangerous.

Spamhaus IP Block

Block Spamhaus Lasso Drop Spam IP Address. (I'll keep this list updated)

GENERATED 19/11/2015

Setup

If you have a bizarre or complicated setup, be sure to look everything over before using it. But for anyone with something that resembles a standard Nginx installation, this should work without any issues as long as you include in your nginx.conf the blacklist.conf and blockips.conf.

Copy both blacklist.conf and blockips.conf in your nginx directory (usually is in /etc/nginx but this can differ if nginx was compiled). Once you copied the files edit nginx.conf and under(usually at the end of the file) the http block add this lines:

## Include blacklist for bad bot and referrer blocking.
include blacklist.conf;
include blockips.conf;