Should we block countries, Yes or No?

**monkeyboy** · 29-05-07

I was wondering what people thought about blocking all web traffic from certain countries?

As with many websites we get traffic that for one reason or another we'd rather not bother with. For example this morning we have someone on an Iranian IP address trying to post HTML to our search box. I appreciate that the reasons behind this may not be malicious in this instance, but undoubtedly in some instances it will be.

Our server validates everything that gets submitted so we have no worries on that front, but as we have never had a sale from Iran why waste bandwidth by even responding to the request?

So block countries yes/no?

If yes which countries? I'm inclined to add China to the list as so far all we get from there is spam. Any others?

**deadgoodundies** · 29-05-07

Yes we do it for certain countries.

For example 99 times out of 100 an order from Singapore is fraudlent - it's not worth us shipping to them so first of all we just removed that country from our accepted list of countries we deliver to then we ended up getting lots of attempted orders putting the address in as hong kong but then in the customer notes asking for it to be shipped to singapore - so then we just blocked the whole country as it wasnt worth the hassle.

At the end of the day though the professional scammer with use a proxy instead.

**monkeyboy** · 30-05-07

It's not just the scammers that concern me, it's also the spammers, hackers and crackers who look for ways to exploit and/or gain access to our systems.

We are well protected against attack but there is always the worry that some new exploit will be found and used before it is patched.

**Dirvan Molando** · 30-05-07

If some one would like to spam your site he can always use an anonymous proxy.

Originally Posted by monkeyboy

It's not just the scammers that concern me, it's also the spammers, hackers and crackers who look for ways to exploit and/or gain access to our systems.

We are well protected against attack but there is always the worry that some new exploit will be found and used before it is patched.