I think Joomla made a big mistake (for revenue for website developers) in making 2.0 then 2.5 and then several versions of 3.x in such a short time. Not surprising that customers are reluctant to update.
One of the 1.5 sites had a massive (and I do mean massive) hack attacks, trying to 'guess' the admin password. Almost 1600 computers were involved almost all from Russia and the Ukraine. Normally I would use a Geo Block, but our customer are a Law firm and they actually have business connections in Russia. We had a similar attack, with 600+ computers on one of our other sites, mainly from the USA and Ecuador. Using Admin Tools, I set the ban to 365 days, but I would like to make this PERMANENT.
I tried adding deny from <IP> to the .htaccess, but there are over 200 lines and once added, no-one could access the server. I asked the Hosting company if they could block these parasites on their firewall, but I think they have a vested interest in all these morons sucking up the bandwidth, because "we can't help you".
Is there any way to ban these 2000+ IP Addresses PERMANENTLY without having to add them one at a time to the Site IP Blacklist?