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That can get tricky as a general case, but would probably work OK for most people in this specific case. But, then again, hopefully you've patched bash already anyway, so blocking hosts that are scanning for a vulnerability that you've already fixed probably won't accomplish much.

Generally speaking, if you use something like iptables to block abusive hosts, you dive head-first into a very deep rabbit hole. Usually sysadmins don't want hosts blocked forever or iptables with 30k+ lines in them, so now you have to also add some kind of automated ban-clearing feature. Then you want to make sure you don't ban certain networks, so now you have to have some kind of whitelist feature. Then sysadmins will want to be able to tune which networks are trusted and which aren't, so now you have to add some configuration options for it. And so on.

I've written some software for my servers that does this for several different annoyances, and I spend almost as much time tuning the software as I spent dealing with the annoyances in the first place.

If sysadmins really want to auto-ban abusive hosts, you're probably better off letting them do it with something like Fail2Ban, and then all that muckety-muck becomes their problem, and not yours.




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