What’s an IP blocklist and why is it essential to running your network, platform, website or app? An IP blocklist is a security measure put in place to prevent access to a network system from specific IP addresses that are known or suspected to be associated with malicious or bot activities.
Some bot traffic is welcome, like search engine spiders that crawl your website content and index your pages or keep track of your unique monthly visitors, page views, and demographics. But IP addresses with a track record of malicious activity should not be granted access to your website.
An IP address may appear on an IP blocklist when used in connection with:
- Spam emails
- Malware
- Domain hijacking
- Phishing scams
- Bot behavior
- Generating invalid traffic
- Proxy or VPN
IP blocklists are one of the primary tools used to combat bot traffic that wants to interact with your system. Essentially, it helps insulate you from known risky IP or bot IP addresses by banning them in the first place.
How Are Blocklists Set-Up
Setting up your blocklist will vary on your network or system. This could be a web-based GUI or a command-line interface where you’ll have the ability to enter IP addresses to block individually or programmatically. Blocking individual IP addresses is usually done when preventing particular users or blocks of users from accessing a website or server whereas programmatic blocklists are done at scale. This should be done only by a network administrator or someone authorized to access these settings.
How To Block IP Addresses At Scale
When used to prevent bot traffic or access to risky IP addresses, programmatic control of the blocklist is necessary. Large ad networks or platforms
For large numbers of IP addresses (into the millions), manual entry can be impractical. In these cases, consider:
- Using API access to automate the process
- Importing a list of IPs from a file (download your free IP blocklist here)
- Utilizing external blocklists or threat intelligence feeds
- Employing dynamic blocklists that can be updated from an external source
An IP blocklist is the industry’s solution to malicious bot traffic. Rather than play whack-a-mole trying to catch suspicious activity on your server and then banning the IP address from coming back, an IP blocklist pre-emptively blocks addresses deemed suspicious or actively malicious. The IP blocklist prevents bots, automated scripts, and non-human traffic from accessing your website or app, eliminating the potential for cybersecurity attacks, spam, or phony analytics.
How Are Blocklists Generated?
At any given time on the internet, FraudLogix is detecting about 10,000,000 IP addresses that are actively committing ad fraud. That’s a lot of IPs to track down and block from accessing your API. IP activity is tracked through pixels on various sites that then pool their information on whether or not the IP appears to be controlled by a bot. Once discovered, the IP is added to the list and is prevented from interacting with the website or service.
It’s important to note that the size of the IP blocklist database and supporting data are the most important factors in whether or not it does a good job at preventing bot traffic. FraudLogix for example, has the most comprehensive IP blocklist of non-human traffic in the industry because of the database’s size and quality inputs. These include generating and updating IP blocklists based on:
- Ad-tech platform partnerships – Fresh data from the world’s largest ad-tech platforms are used to update the blocklist.
- Honeypot traps – Actively identifying risky IPs through code on over 300 million sites (samples about 30% of all traffic).
- Client partnerships – Data identifying bad IP addresses is shared across the platform.
- Device ID blocking – Correlating device ID with IP behavior to identify bot activity.
Fraudlogix is an expert resource providing bot solutions to some of tech’s most prominent platforms. Harnessing the industry’s collective knowledge to eliminate bots and ad fraud, Fraudlogix has the most frequently updated global feed of high-risk IPs in digital marketing while actively monitoring 30 percent of the global digital population.
IP blocklisting is just one way to make managing your bot traffic more — well, manageable. A bot manager allows good bots access to your API while blocking the fraudulent or malicious bots.
IP Blocklist Or IP Blacklist?
Across the web you will see the terms IP blocklist, IP blacklist or IP exclusion list be used interchangeably, however, the term “IP blacklist” is being de-emphasized throughout the industry because it’s not as descriptive and may have negative connotations. At Fraud Logix, we embrace more neutral, inclusive language in our tech ecosystem and we’ve decided to replace “blacklist” with “blocklist” across our platforms and documentation.
By adopting “blocklist,” we seek to maintain technical clarity while promoting a more welcoming environment for all. We believe these small but meaningful changes contribute to a more equitable industry and invite our partners and users to join us in this forward-thinking approach.
