On: Is it normal to get hundreds of break-in attempts ...

[aquarin]

I have thousands attempts at my nginx server mostly from China and most of them checking for free proxy server. I am even convinced it is some sort of automatic software scanning IP ranges for proxy. Freedom is difficult in some countries.

[aquarin → aquarin]

If you see requests like: "GET http://somesite/proxycheck.php

Try this in Nginx server config: if ($request ~* "^[^ ]+[ ]+[^:]+://" ) { return 444; }

444 is nonstandard Nginx code that closes the connection without sending any headers.