Overview
A common question we get is “can we block China?” or “can we show US pricing for US customers?“. To achieve either of these, you need to have software which can read the IP addresses (how computers talk to each other) from people requesting access to your website and use a database which has known list of locations that IP belongs to.
Databases such as Maxmind GeoIP2 have a paid subscription for their database, which gets continually updated. This particular database can integrate into a number of firewall products, webservers such as nginx (used by Conetix) and directly into applications as well.
Geolocation
Solutions already exist for popular eCommerce platforms such as WooCommerce. You can use plugins such as WooCommerce Multi-currency, which will allow you to automatically adjust pricing based on the users location (without any changes to your hosting).
If you need a custom solution where your web application doesn’t currently provide integration, this can be setup directly via nginx and either pass through headers to the application or include specific rules and redirects directly from nginx.
At present, this is supported for Virtual Private Server customers only and requires additional software and setup. Please contact the Conetix team if you require further information.
Geoblocking
Beyond just showing or tagging where the IP comes from, you can also use a firewall service to block traffic based on the location. Most people assume that if they block a country, they block all access and keep their website safer. This is false.
Geoblocking will only reduce some noise in your log files and doesn’t ever affect the security of your website. This is because nearly all malicious scripts and hackers use other infected websites and servers to scan your website for vulnerabilities. It means even if the person controlling this scan originates from a different country, the actual requests hitting your website are going to come from countries all around the world.
The typical attacks we see to our network will vary week to week location wise, as it will depend on where other infected sites and servers are located. As shown in the image above of malicious hits to our servers, this snapshot shows heavy US traffic (mostly from the larger cloud providers) but also a significant number of hits from within Australia too. Blocking one or two countries doesn’t therefore make any meaningful difference.
Conetix therefore does not provide nor support any geoblocking at a firewall level.
If your top priority is security (as we believe it should be for most!), then the critical areas to focus on are keeping your website up-to-date and ensuring you use secure passwords. If you don’t have this packaged into a plan with your web developer and don’t wish to do it yourself, we highly recommend looking at our Managed WordPress plan where we take care of all the updates for you.