Blocklists help you block malicious IPs that have been flagged by multiple threat intelligence sources. This helps to prevent attacks like spam, malware infections, and brute force login attempts from gaining unauthorized access to systems. Blocking these attackers early on helps to limit the damage they can do and buys time for other security measures to respond.

However, VPN and proxy risk scoring  know how to avoid getting put on blacklists by constantly changing their IP addresses or using spoofing techniques. To combat this, it’s important to select blocklists that are updated regularly and are ultra-curated with behavior-driven threat intelligence. This minimizes the size of the lists, reduces false positives, and ensures accuracy. Additionally, integrating these lists with firewalls and CDNs streamlines them for efficient operation without impacting legitimate traffic.

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When configuring the Valid Client IP Handler or the Client IP Selector in vWAF, you can exclude ranges of IP addresses from the global list. This will ensure that incoming IP addresses from the excluded ranges are not written to the global list. You can also set up excluded IP addresses on the vWAF server-side by using the excluded IP address field in the Configuration page.

Another limitation of traditional blocklists is that they can become extremely large, slowing down performance and consuming resources. This can be mitigated by integrating the lists with firewalls and CDNs, optimizing them for efficient operation, and by adding reporting features such as feedback loops to quickly identify issues.