IP blocking is a way to prevent contact with another system and protect servers from malicious actions. It can be used to prevent tracking cookies, limit information access, and block proxy servers. IP addresses can ban entire groups of computers or countries.
Internet Protocol (IP) address blocking, more commonly known as IP blocking, is a way for an Internet server or other program that communicates online to prevent contact with another system. One of the most common uses for IP blocking is to prevent a computer that poses a known security threat from making contact with a server, thus protecting the server from any malicious actions. Other uses for IP blocking include preventing tracking cookies or websites from seeing your actions and limiting information access to a network. While there are several methods that allow an operating system, router, or other software to implement an IP blocker, there are also many ways it can be bypassed, and still more ways to abuse it.
An Internet Protocol address is a unique number that identifies a specific computer on the Internet and also provides information about the physical location of the network through which it connects. Almost all Internet communications identify the IP addresses of the computers that are exchanging data. Many protocols and server software suites include a mechanism that checks an incoming connection against a list of blocked addresses so that you can restrict access and ignore requests from those blocked addresses.
IP blocking is often used as a reactive defense after attempted attacks on a computer system, especially a Denial of Service (DOS) attack or a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack, where the target server is flooded with requests from a malicious system until it shuts down. The same blocking mechanism can also be used to tell mail servers not to receive messages from addresses known to send mass spam emails. By preventing a malicious computer from wasting a server’s resources, efficiency and security can be greatly increased.
Some computers connect to the Internet through an intermediary server called a proxy. There are several public proxy servers that anyone can use and they effectively mask your computer’s real IP address using the proxy. For this reason, some network administrators choose to block popular proxy servers to prevent access.
The information stored in an IP address and the way IP blocking works allow you to ban entire groups of computers at once. This larger area is known as the domain. This can be used if, for example, a single Internet access provider has an unusually large number of malicious hackers. Instead of waiting to find out every single IP address, the entire login provider can be blocked.
The largest range of addresses within an IP address is the country of origin or country code. This can be used to block all internet traffic from a single country from using a server and its resources. Some e-commerce sites do this type of blocking when a large amount of fraud can be traced to IP addresses within a single country.
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