Hey lovely Reddit folks, maybe you can help me out here. I build websites for a living mainly using Wordpress. Recently I learned about a Wordpress Plugin called “Limit Login Attempts Reloaded”. This nifty plugin limits the amount of times a hacker can attempt to login to the admin side of the website. By default, if a hacker bot fails to login after 4 attempts, the plugin will block that IP address for a day. This has been a great tool to strengthen my clients website security and has made me aware just how often my websites are under constant attack from these hacker bots. I receive daily emails from the Wordpress plugin notifying me how many failed attempts there were and how many IP addresses it blocked for 24 hours.
I had a brain blast and wondered what if I changed the 24 hour IP block time to lets say 1 year. This would dramatically cut down the hacker bots coming from the same IP address and would maybe turn my daily email notifications to weekly.
My question however is my lack of understanding how VPN’s choose random IP addresses. Is it possible a stranger using a VPN could show up as my personal computers IP address? If this happened and the Wordpress Plugin blocked that IP, It would hinder my ability to login to the website.
So can a strangers VPN show up as my personal IP address?
Are you sure you have your own public IPv4 address? Because if your ISP uses CGNAT then multiple customers use the same public IPv4 address. And another customer of the same isp may lock you out.
Unless ur home IP address is hosted from somewhere like digital ocean instead of someone like fuse (I hope someone gets this smh)
Wtf no, unless your hosting servers at your house or somthing hell nah. VPN’s work kinda like this, when going to a website or somthing that page request goes to the VPN server in yugoslavia or japan or britain or wherever, in _ location it retrieves the info and shows it to your device. Device>vpnserver>webpage>vpnserver>server that’s bassically it.
With vanilla ISP configuration, they have a block allocated (so an IP address lookup will show your city/country/ISP) and allocate a changing address in that pool.
You can (sometimes for $$) get a “static IP” which doesn’t change.
It’s unlikely, as below, that a VPN would be in your ISP (although there are VPNs that acquire residential IP connections for the very reason that these would tend to be unblocked by Netflix and so on).
This is very helpful! Thank you for explaining shared IP Addresses. I never would have thought about this perspective. I was always under the assumption every device had its own unique IP address but clearly that’s incorrect. I can see that blocking IP address for a long time would hurt a websites success.
That answers my question, Thank you win10-1-0002