One question we get a lot is “how long should we block IP’s observed by STINGAR honeypots?”

Generally, we’ve explained that we block for seven days, a number we arrived at through the highly scientific process of “I dunno…seven days sounded good and we’ve never had reason to change it”. 🙂

While more research needs to be done in this space, we do have at least one partner that showed a marked increase in the number of connections blocked  by extending their block list duration from the original 24 hours. The result is intuitively unsurprising, as we would expect that it would sometimes take more than 24 hours for scanners to get from one network to another, but it’s nice to see the data laid out in a graph.

You may remember an earlier version of this graph; this graph shows roughly a doubling of connections blocked starting in May 2019, when the block time was extended from 24 hours to four days. So perhaps the magic number is between 4-7 days (which would jibe with the anecdata I’ve collected over the years), or maybe it’s not. We see good results in this range and will be leveraging STINGAR and our own network flow and block data to try and (more scientifically) identify a reasonable block lifespan.