Blocking Access By Country

  • 98cdkfekxh

    (@98cdkfekxh)


    6 years, 6 months ago

    Hello, I am kind of new to WordPress and this is my first post. I wanted to ask what the thinking is on blocking access to WordPress sites by country of origin.

    I started to think about this when I was reviewing analytics for a small local business and seeing all these international hits. I assume it’s bot traffic of some kind but I am certain that my client has no interest in anything outside our town let alone another country.

    I am a big fan of CLoudflare and was able to block the traffic with a simple free rule. My question is… am I missing anything or is this a good idea? I am thinking that limiting unwanted access and preserving server resources can’t be a bad thing right? Why don’t more people do this?

    Thanks in advance!

    • This topic was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Everything else WordPress topic
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  • Elise Alley

    (@ecalley)

    6 years, 4 months ago

    Hi 98cdkfekxh,

    GeoIP banning isn’t necessarily a bad idea but it also doesn’t help for security as much as some people think.

    The company I work for has a security plugin and we often get asked why we don’t include GeoIP Banning as a feature. There are a number of reasons but the ones I think would apply to your question as well are that hackers are not limited to IP addresses in their country (they have IP addresses around the globe to use for their attacks), almost half of the IP addresses are in the US (see quote below) and adding this to a site would increase the load on the site when processing a login, magnifying the effect of a distributed brute force attack.

    …according to MaxMind, the go to source for GeoIP databases, they are tracking 3,615,573,718 IP addresses by country, 44% of which are associated with the United States.

    I hope this at least gives you some idea why it’s not more common!

    Thanks,

    Elise

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