methods and apparatus are provided for selectively overriding the blocking of traffic due to automated detection algorithms . a target victim can protect against unwanted traffic by maintaining a central filter identifying a source address of at least one source computing device whose transmission of packets to the target victim should be limited ; maintaining an override filter listing at least one regular expression identifying one or more source computing devices whose transmission of packets to the target victim should be transmitted to the target victim ; converting the source address to an address in a domain name service format if the central filter indicates that the received at least one packet is received from the at least one source computing device ; and transmitting the at least one packet to the target victim if the domain name service format satisfies a regular expression appearing in the override filter .