At Country IP Blocks we get lots of email from individuals with complaints about blocking a country. The complaints state that it is not fair to prevent access from anyone, anywhere at any time. They go on to state it is racist, discriminatory, bigoted, mean-spirited and outright unfair. We appreciate and understand their emotional arguments.
The Country IP Blocks database has no flag for the ethnic, religious, racial, sexual, backgrounds of the people of any country.
Network administrators and website owners making the argument the internet should be wide open, with no preventative blocks, no restrictions of any kind, with free unlimited access to their networks and websites are not bad people, but they are naïve. They also have a higher likelihood to become known as hacker victims.
An uninformed emotional argument leads to bad security.
The decision to protect your electronic resources, websites, servers, network appliances, etc., must be based on logic and reason, not emotional hyperbole.
On any given day, the vast majority of network hacks, comments, and email spam, originate from a handful of countries. China is an excellent example. Do a Google search on Chinese hackers. There are myriad articles on the danger posed by traffic originating from China. On the Country IP Blocks Metric Scale of Dangerous Countries, China scores a ten (scale of 1 – 10).
If network traffic from China poses a more significant risk than say, network traffic from Antigua & Barbuda, you may want to ask yourself whether network traffic from China has any value to your network or website. The question should not be one of fair or unfair. The question should be one based on assumed risk versus potential rewards.
Are you doing business in China? Then you need to decide whether the potential for reward is worth the level of risk you assume when you accept email, web or network traffic originating from China or any country.
Your firewall, IPtables, Cisco ACL, .htaccess file or other security solution does not detect the race, religion, ethnicity, personal grooming habits, eye color, intelligence level, sexual preference, honesty, integrity or general goodwill of the person or persons behind traffic coming in to your network, website or email box. It does not care because unlike humans it does not have the capacity to make emotional decisions. The decisions it makes are logical, based on rule sets, patterns and access control lists. By nature, a firewall discriminates.
Security decisions are important. They should be made in advance of launching your electronic enterprise. They are a constant, but they are also dynamic.
At Country IP Blocks we provide access control lists. We provide network data on each country in the world. We provide information on every allocated, active or bogon IP network on the planet. How to use this information is up to you.
Sign up and login to the Country IP Blocks message board and let us know how you make your security decisions.