So a company sell goods that cannot be exported out of the united states, and for whatever reason, has a higher-than-normal amount of attacks going on most of which stem from the middle east, china, and russia (not really that surprising in itself).

Software would be (site is being currently designed) Magento, using best security practices, checking out any 3rd party stuff heavily, etc. While always concerned about security, I don’t feel there are any obvious (or hidden) "problems" per say that have me worried.

So.. site owner mentioned something about blocking traffic from basically any country outside the US. I don’t know how I feel about this. Besides the shortcomings of blacklisting in general, I’m not sure if this would affect any SEO rankings, other search engines, etc.

Anyone have any thoughts about blacklisting IP’s based on country/region?

I know very little about SEO but I thought that websites like google used different domain variants/keyword tracking for different countries.

install geoip php plugin and get a mxmind database and just redirect everything not us to yahoo.com

So you’d go that route over something like a simple htaccess list?

I’m guessing you have your reasons why you are doing it that way… I’ll check that out and see whats up.

Thanks

There are several lists on the internet of international IPblocks. The thing is the further out you block them the better. So adding IP blocks to your firewall is the best possible way vs letting the request get all the way to the .htaccess list.

While you are at it block cuil and scrapers/shitty SE’s because they add unnecessary load as well if you are really getting that much traffic.

You can also set your firewall up to block requests after a certain number of attempts over a period of time.

Hmmmm.. the upstream thing definitely makes more sense. Client is running some weird hosting solution, and I’m trying to move him to a VPS. Will check and see if I can get access to httpd.conf or conf.d.

So besides the obvious flaws with a blacklist type philosophy, have you guys ever implemented such a thing and noticed any sort of improvement on attacks? Noticed anything else (I keep worrying about SEO stuff, but can’t decide whether or not it would make a notable difference)?