A web master has come to the conclusion that the first step in managing this sort of activity is to, “block all traffic from China:

I run quite a few few websites and blogs and my solution to this problem was first to BLOCK all traffic from China, I allow nothing, nada, zip from China based IPs. From my personal experience 100% of China’s internet traffic is hacking attempts, email SPAM and phishing. I have never encountered a single China access that could be considered positive.

Blocking China has solved about 80~90% of the problem. The second thing is to block specific domains and IPs from Russia, Romania, Brazil, Taiwan, Korea, Poland and may other ex Soviet Satellites. I can’t block all access to these countries because there is about 90% of legitimate traffic and the 10% left are probably compromised computers being used as proxies/bots for China.

I tried to find the original source for this and a quick google indicates that there are a significant number of web masters who are beginning to consider this as a first step for web security on their sites.

Obviously, I am not a webmaster, but I’m wondering just how wide spread this phenomenon is.