Use of IP Ban Lists
Due to a recently documented discovery of potentially malicious/spy or otherwise nodes which are displaying suspicious behaviour the option to add lists of Banned IPs to your node has been enabled.
Should you be curious to the nature of your "exposure" you may be interested to know how many of these suspected nodes are present within your connected Peer lists, White Peer Lists and Gray Peer lists. The below tool runs from your terminal will compare your local lists with the online published https://github.com/Boog900/monero-ban-list Ban List
wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shermand100/PiNodeXMR/refs/heads/master/BanListCompare.sh | bash
To then mitigate this risk, as of December 2024, and PiNodeXMR v6.24.12 Additional tools and options are available in the terminal setup Menu.
The top two entries are pre-populated lists you may select to 'pull/merge' into your currently empty local ban list. This 'pull/merge' will not remove duplicate entries, the list ill only grow so allowing you to add multiple ban lists should you see the need.
As such, your local list may become out-of-date, so the list can be cleared entirely with the 4th option.
The third option is there because I do not believe it's my decision which IPs should be censored, I also cannot testify to the quality of those lists provided in those links (Boog900 & GUI.XMR.PM). Like most options and features for the PiNodeXMR project it is another feature that has been called for and so I have provided, do your own research. If on doing your on research you find a better source of IPs you'd like to ban you may either specify the URL (e.g. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Boog900/monero-ban-list/refs/heads/main/ban_list.txt) to a text document list as shown below (each line escaped), or add the file locally and specify it's path (e.g /home/pinodexmr/ban_list.txt) and the list will be merged.
*Note, the local file will be deleted after merge to avoid clutter
