[Eril-l] Sci-Hub users asking us to restore their access!

[Butler, Paul]

Hi Melissa,

I must say this is the first time I have heard users from Sci-Hub reaching out to a library to request access be restored. That is comical!

A polite educational email seems reasonable, but likely won’t do much to dissuade them – they just want access to the content by any means.

Some techniques that can be used to secure EZProxy, that depend on you and your institution’s ability/comfort to tweak EZProxy...

Tracking down and reporting the compromised user account to campus IT is the first step. While campus IT does their work I generally block the user account from EZProxy and terminate all active sessions.

I maintain a list of referrers that I block from EZProxy. If you haven’t done that I would suggest it as another useful step. You can find it here: https://github.com/prbutler/EZProxy_IP_Blacklist/blob/master/EZProxy_IfReferer_Blacklist.txt

You can also block access by country, if you are seeing trends and know a legitimate user would not come from a specific country. This is a good temporary measure. ALL access from a specific country can be blocked by adding the following to the top of config.txt. Country codes are the same as those in the audit logs.

::Common
IfCountry US; Stop
IfCountry BR; Audit Blocking BR; Deny denied.htm
IfCountry CN; Audit Blocking CN; Deny denied.htm
IfCountry IR; Audit Blocking IR; Deny denied.htm
/Common

Using Option BlockCountryChange can also help, see the documentation here: https://www.oclc.org/support/services/ezproxy/documentation/cfg/option-blockcountrychange.en.html

Tweaking UsageLimit seems reasonable, it is always a balancing act, contact me off list if you would like to know what we use, or have any other questions.

Finally, you can always block access by IP. I maintain the EZProxy IP Blacklist, which is a community supported effort to share IP addresses that have been used for fraudulent activity. See here: https://github.com/prbutler/EZProxy_IP_Blacklist. And if you are willing to share the IP addresses used for the fraudulent activity please send them my way and I can add them to the blacklist.

With all of this, be sure to check your messages.txt file after you restart EZProxy to make sure nothing has broken.

Caveat emptor!

Cheers, Paul
-------------------------------------------------
Paul R Butler, mlis
Library Technologies Support Analyst
Library Information Technology Services (L.I.T.S)
Ball State University<bsu.edu>
Muncie, IN  47306
P: 765.285.8032
E: prbutler at bsu.edu<mailto:prbutler at bsu.edu>

University Libraries...a destination for research, learning, and friends

The University Libraries provide services that support student pursuits for academic success and faculty endeavors for knowledge creation and classroom instruction.

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Melissa Belvadi
Sent: Monday, October 03, 2016 12:41 PM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: [Eril-l] Sci-Hub users asking us to restore their access!

We've recently gotten a spate of emails sent to our ezproxy admin address from various users around the world, all basically complaining that we've somehow blocked their use of Sci-Hub (!) and asking us to restore their access.  One of them even sent a screenshot so we know what they're seeing is the "deny.htm" file in ezproxy.

They are all very polite and seem to think they are entitled to access, as if they have no idea what they are doing is illegal, or that the address they are writing to is for an institution that is unwittingly involved as a result of being hacked.

Here's an example of one such email (leaving off the signature part - they are all very open as to who they are):
I’m a French OT student, actually doing litterature researches for my studies. I’m using scihub to get some articles that I need to reed for that work. Today my access has been blocked.

I would be very grateful to you if you could open my access.
And another:
My access to sci-hub has been temporarily denied, due to excessive downloads. I am sorry but I am actually writing my thesis and need to read that many articles.

I would be really grateful if you could give my access back. I cannot afford paying for all those articles online. My thesis is due for early November. You guys are my only option.

We've been able to use our ezproxy logs to trace back the most recent activity to a particular student's compromised account, and dealt with that one that we could find.

If I understand what's happening, Sci-Hub has collected a huge number of compromised usernames/passwords from many institutions and tries them (right through our proxy server) when the article someone requests from them is not already in their archive. If so, it's probably rare that this illegal use will even trigger an "excessive use" denial and consequently any chance of us even knowing this is going on.

Has anyone else gotten emails like this?

If so:
How do you handle it, aside from trying to find the breached account? Do you try to explain to the "user" that what they're doing is illegal?
Are you further lowering your max downloads for major publisher sites to try to stop it?

--
Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca> 902-566-0581


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