I was playing around with fail2ban and started thinking.
If I ban bots, is that actually a net negative to the health of the internet?
When you ban bots, they just go to the next server. Because your server does not have default or dumb passwords it was unlikely to be breached anyways, the bot was just wasting its resources.
When you ban it, it moves to the next one where it has a higher chance to succeed.
The two ideas I have to impose higher costs on bots is
- Tarpit
Tying up resources indefinitely seems more useful than just blocking it. Although compute is so cheap it probably doesn't matter nowadays. Maybe more effective back when bots were simpler.
- Report it to abuseipdb and similar
I'm not sure if the aipdb et al are actually annoying enough that bots would spend time avoid getting on those lists?
I have an idea for doing a test, I'll take two IP:s and put fail2ban on them.
On one, we don't ban, just report it to abuseipdb.
On the other we just ban.
I'm curious if this will affect the amount of scans hitting it.
MAJOR Plot twist! 
