Most businesses, institutions and organizations share a desire to have their website be as secure as possible to mitigate the risk of bad actors accessing the site, or other types of malicious cyberactivity. Likewise, most site owners already have a range of tactics in place including DDOS mitigation, Web Application Firewalls, Intrusion Detection, Advanced Bot Protection, Credential Stuffing Protection and Screen Scraping Protection. In addition to these, adding geo-blocking to the suite of hosting services is highly recommended. Blocking traffic from these bad actor countries can dramatically reduce your exposure to attacks like brute-force logins, spam, and exploit attempts. And the good news – it’s available at an affordable rate with minimal setup time.
Global threats are on the rise
In 2024, there were 900 million cyberattacks from 213 countries, up 115% from 2023 according to a report from Forescout.com. What’s more is that 78% of these attacks came from the same 10 countries. The United States is the most targeted country for these attacks, and the top industries targeted by these attacks include financial services, government and telecommunications.
What is geo-blocking?
A geo-block policy is a security measure that restricts, or blocks traffic based on the geographic location of incoming requests. The policy is based on a list of known high-risk countries identified as bad actors due to their association with malicious activity or elevated security threats. At ZAG, this policy is enforced through Cloudflare and operates at the perimeter of the website.
How does geo-blocking work?
Geo-blocking is a smart security filter that blocks incoming traffic based on the IP address of the geographic origin of the request. Through our trusted partner, Cloudflare, we can implement this at the perimeter of your website - keeping harmful traffic out before it even hits your systems.
This policy targets countries identified as high-risk due to elevated levels of malicious activity. ZAG can make recommendations for which countries to include, but the specific list of geographies blocked will be customized based on your institution’s needs, and can continue to be updated over time.
What to expect when geo-blocking is in place?
Aside from obviously enhancing your site’s security, once in place, geo-blocking can result in better server performance by reducing traffic from irrelevant or harmful regions, as well as a reduction in junk form submissions since many of these same countries are responsible for targeting forms as well.
Once in place, one potential downside is that if there is legitimate traffic you do want to accept from folks in these blocked countries that too will be blocked by default. If this is a concern, it’s one to talk about with your managed hosting provider.
At ZAG, we are responsible for managed hosting for a range of businesses and organizations and security is our top priority. If you’d like to add geo-blocking to your suite of hosting services, get in touch with your Account Manager or contact us online.