Will put together a small tutorial on this one. But basically you can force IP addies to error out if some one tries to browse to your site via a nominate IP range. Helps to stave off those image link/refresh things, and having a few hundred/thousand dummy links arriving via the IP range.

Banning IP's is pretty useless. I'm no where near a hacker, and I know how to use proxies to mask my IP address and have access to thousands of them.

However, if you some how trace it, DOS attacks are a felony. If you find the guy(s) doing it, they can go to jail for a long time. Plus, they will probably never be let near a computer again.

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How often do you actually hear of hackers going to jail? Unfortunately, nowhere near often enough. It really is a sad thing, but I think that our time as webmasters is better spent trying to both avoid and prevent hacking than it is trying to investigate our attacks to find the perpetrators. Even if you do find somebody who you know did it, you are more than likely not going to have both the connections and the money to get the person prosecuted and either fined or locked up. People hack sites constantly....it has become just an everyday thing...it is unfortunately not taken seriously unless the victim is a governmental site, a commercial site, one with personal information, or a powerful site (such as google, msn, etc)

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Well... A russian hacker was attempting to ruin my websites good name recently. I did a little investigating and found out a lot of information about him. Including his phone number and email address... If I cared enough, I could have the Russian athorities look into it.

He was getting in through a script exploit which gave him access to my 777 directories. I solved the problem rather quickly and haven't seen any activity from him since.

If I could afford it, I would give him a call and tell him to stop.

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I have a dynamic IP address. It changes every few days (Slow host to change. Usually dynamic IP's change every few hours). You would have trouble catching me. (I won't be stealing or hacking anyways, so it doesn't really matter)

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Most dynamic IP's are actually fairly easy to track down...as most of them will operate on the same sub-net or just a few different sub-nets. Sub-net being the first two values in your IP (42.9.xxx.xx) Most ISP's or provide dynamic IP's will only change the last two values in your IP...So if you are the admin, you can track down the hacker by their sub-net and ban that entire sub-net from your forums...Which then introduces the possibility of banning innocent viewers, but that's a whole other story

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