Serbian Website Blacklist for PiHole and AdGuard Home

-

In today's digital age, protecting oneself from online threats has become a necessity. With the ever-growing presence of adware, malware, fraud, and scams lurking on the internet, users need robust solutions to fortify their browsing experiences. Recognizing this need, I'm thrilled to introduce my latest creation: a Serbian website blacklist curated for PiHole and AdGuard Home users.

Origin

This journey began with a simple yet profound realization: the internet landscape is rife with nefarious entities seeking to exploit unsuspecting users (including, say, my youngest family members). To counter this, I've become a user of AdGuard home running on my RaspberryPi in my home network. But there was somewhat of a gap in the sea of AdGuard blacklists out there - there are no (at least to my knowledge) blacklists dedicated to spammers and fraudsters operating in Serbia and Balkans.

Luckily, security and privacy aware users of the Bezbedan Balkan forum have started compiling all sorts of lists of nefarious websites targeted at internet users in Serbia and Balkans. I went on to compile their findings in a single list, using the PiHole/AdGuard home readable format.

If you've gone this far and only want to proceed to start using the list (and you know how to do it) - go ahead! You can copy and paste the following address to your PiHole or AdGuard home to add the new blocklist:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aleksandarristic/blacklist/main/lists/scam_hosts_srb.txt

Don't forget to visit the repository for details: https://github.com/aleksandarristic/blacklist

Key Features and Benefits

  1. Regular Updates: Our blacklist is not static; it evolves with the ever-changing threat landscape. Updated at least weekly, to maintain protection against malicious entities. PRs on Github are welcome.
  2. Coverage: The blacklist contains different sections dedicated to Scams, Domain Typosquatting, Phishing and IoT related known malicious websites. This is by no means a "complete list", but it will significantly reduce your chances of getting scammed.
  3. Compatibility: The list has a usual format of website-per-line, with comment lines beginning with a "#" character. It's out of the box compatible with PiHole and AdGuard home (and possibly other tools out there).
  4. Community-driven: The list is compiled by active users of Bezbedan Balkan forum and is up-to-date with fraud and scam campaigns targeted at Serbian and Balkans internet users.
  5. Tooling included: The repository contains a small tool to easily update the list, along with keeping the existing sections, formatting, deduplication, simple substitution.

Disclaimer

This repository and the blacklist is an effort completely done in free time. As many of you could assume, this is a cat and mouse game with the bad guys out there. I will try to update the list as soon as I can (sometimes many times in a single day), but it will always be behind the scammers and fraudsters. Be aware that this list may not protect you from scams, but it will certainly help reduce the chance for it.

Obligatory shout-out to users of Bezbedan Balkan forum

If you haven't already heard about the Bezbedan Balkan forum, and you are interested in cybersecurity, osint, internet safety, privacy and other related topics - do go ahead and take a look at it. It's a valuable resource for everyone that wants to remain up-to-date in these topics regarding the whole Balkans. As a plus - there's some good people there that love this sort of work and they do it for free.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Comparing protected PDF files using Adobe Acrobat

-
Reviewing long PDF documents, especially ones with a lot of legalese, is cumbersome and tedious work. It takes a lot of time to just read and understand everything, especially when the document is not written in your native language. So, you read, and you finish the review, and you have a set of changes you need to do. The other party makes the changes, and then you need to confirm that everything is as you requested. And what if the old and the new version of your PDF document is protected? The Problem I found myself in a pickle once with protected PDFs. I needed to quickly review and compare two versions of PDF documents, ~100 pages long, with my changes added; turned out that the other side has also added ~150 changes to the document that are less relevant, such as spelling and grammar. And both previous and the new version were protected, thus disabling my ability to simply feed both documents to Adobe Acrobat Pro DC and compare. Due to the protections, I was unable to edit, or eve...
Read more

Sad state of email encryption in Serbia - or how a web based bank just does not encrypt emails

-
Image
Not long ago, browsing through my received emails in my gmail, I've realized that one of the banks I use does not use TLS when sending emails to their clients. Of course, being a security aware customer of the bank, and having in mind that I am their client, I've decided to contact them with this information, pointing out the fact that Gmail, a 21st century go-to free email provider, makes this very prominent in each mail they send. The usual ways of contacting the bank in question is either via phone, email or Twitter. Since they don't encrypt their email traffic, and I didn't have time for waiting on their staff on the phone (who does these days, right?), I've decided to use Twitter. I had previous experience with them via this channel, and a positive one. They seemed to be on top of any problems they receive via tweets, and are quite fast to reply. Translation: "Hello @TelenorBanka, did you know that emails you're sending to your clients are not en...
Read more