hehe. I guess that's something I should address, not legality per se (which is a joke), but the ethics/morality of using such a thing as a Reverse DOS. (thanks for pointing this out Carson.) In the case of 'hostile' probes against your webserver, the answer is that the use of a Reverse DOS is definitely moral. In fact it's the ethical thing to do. As long as you are sure that a zombie/script-kiddie/hacker is probing your box, you're making the Net a safer place by doing everything you can to disrupt them. It's not only a form of target hardening for your site, it also means that if the process is automated it will hopefully waste a ton of time on your site before it gives up and goes somewhere else (maybe even a server that isn't as secure as yours). In the realm of just trying to stop people from scraping your site, morality/ethics take a back-seat. In other words, sure it's moral/ethical.. it's yourr site, your content, you can do what you want with it. Just stand aware, obviously, that if you piss-off legit users they may go elsewhere to provide the content you are trying to provide to them... there's no accounting for folk, you never know if somebody isn't scraping your site for legit purposes... but I'll address this a bit more in the RDOS docs/configuration guide.