Why You Need Country IP Blocks
The first computer virus appeared in 1971. IN 1981 Rother J, the first computer virus to appear in the wild, infected an Apple machine. The first piece of spam was sent on May 1, 1978. By the mid 1990’s commercial spam was rampant. While technical hacking has been around for more than a century, the 1980’s gave us Kevin Mitnick, and hacking has grown exponentially ever since. Since that time we have seen the emergence of botnets, Zombie computers, and professional cyber-gangs.
Various laws have been enacted to fight the scourge of computer crimes, but in reality they have little effect. Cyber-crime safe havens like China, Russia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, provide all the cover necessary for professional cyber-criminals to wreak havoc on global networks. Local jurisdictions remain uninformed or helpless to respond quickly and adequately. Even the American FBI has limits on what cyber-criminals get investigated. If you are an individual or small corporation the FBI and local law enforcement probably will not have the resources to protect you.
The internet is a revolving door into your business and home. At any given time your network assets, email and websites are under attack by well organized cyber-terrorists, hackers, spoofers, spammers, crackers, identity thieves and others. Many of these attacks originate in countries belonging to the Group of Ten. The Group of Ten is made up of those countries where the most malicious internet traffic originates. As of May 13, 2009, the Group of Ten included China, Brazil, Russia, India, Korea, Viet Nam, Ukraine, Turkey, Italy and Argentina.
Country IP Blocks began with the idea that all network administrators, webmasters and individuals, should have the power to decide who gets through your electronic door. Does your local network really need to allow access to hackers located 12,000 miles away from you? You have the power to decide whether to accept or deny internet traffic into your website or network. Whether you decide to block the current Group of Ten or develop your own Access Control Lists, Country IP Blocks provides you with the information resources necessary to block or allow internet traffic from the countries you choose.
We offer network information on every active public IP address in the world. We also provide Bogon information on reserved or private networks. These are tools to help you build firewalls, Access Control Lists, and .htaccess files.
Our data is country specific (soon to include continents) and comes in seven different formats: CIDR, Netmask, IP Range, .htaccess deny, .htaccess allow, Decimal/CIDR and Hex/CIDR. We can also custom format the data to meet your specific needs.
There are several ways to access our data. In the right hand column of this page you will notice a list of countries. Choose a data format then select one country or use your Shift or CTRL keys to make multiple selections at once. Click on Choose Countries and preformatted country specific lists are created. Each list contains the country identification, ISO code, number of networks, number of subnets and numerically sorted networks.
Similar information is also available on seven format specific pages. These pages, CIDR, Netmask, IP Range, .htaccess deny, .htaccess allow, Decimal/CIDR and Hex/CIDR also include checksum values so you can track related network changes.
You may also use the Search IP form at the top right corner of the website to search IP specific data.
Our Country IP database is updated at least once every 24 hours. This means you get the freshest, most accurate global network data anytime and all the time.
We also offer excellent tools and training, with more to come.
We take network security seriously. We want to help you do the same. Please try Country IP Blocks. Compare our free data with the data of our competitors. You will find us knowledgeable, proactive, current and responsive. All we ask in return is for you to give us a linkback on your website or to invite your friends and colleagues to utilize our data.
You need Country IP Blocks.
Agree completely with this service. What’s the most efficient way to use this data in a PHP script? IP range? Are there good sample scripts out there? I just want to run the block on my comments submit page. Thanks!
The format you use may depend on your hardware firewall. If you don’t have a hardware firewall your choice may depend on the volume of data you are using and the software you use. If you want to run the block on your comment page the most efficent way to do so would be to store the data in a database and use a PHP script to do the search.
As for the format, I would suggest storing your IP blocks in decimal. This makes them easier to use and provides for faster searching. We may consider providing the data in a database ready format along with scripts to create the database and add the data. We would also include a PHP script for searches.
Do you think this would be helpful? If we can get enough interest from our visitors, which would need to include linkbacks/mentions on their blogs, websites, etc.
It would be useful to have consolidated network blocks. There are many small subnets for China for example — from 112.0.0.0 to 112.255.255.255. These many subnets give a bad performance on a firewall — a simple consolidated 112.0.0.0/8 would be much better.
And: It would be useful to have simple persistant download links. It’d like to update China and other contries by just downloading an ASCII-file. I don’t want do cut & paste manually.
We are considering the addition of the features you mentioned, but will probably do so with subscription access so we can recoup some of our costs.