Why so hard to block traffic from foreign countries?

[Pierre Balian]

Hello,

I manage over 200 websites, most are built on Wordpress. Managing security for all of these sites is a major hassle. I am spending WAY too much time cleaning up hacked websites.

Looking at the logs all of the bullshit almost always originates outside of the united states. Usually China, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Lithuania, etc. etc. etc.

Our sites are exclusively local businesses. I know the best prevention for hacking is keeping your CMS and plugins up to date. However this doesn't always work. My host says there are ways to accomplish blocking, but that they negatively impact performance. I have a Xeon E5 server with oodles of RAM. How much of a performance impact?

I guess what I am getting at, is this is a feature you see requested over and over and over. Why is this so difficult to accomplish? Why isn't there a good way to handle the blocking without large performance losses? We can cache web pages, cant you cache IP tables?

Cant somebody build some litespeed addon that could take care of this? I'm sure it would sell like hotcakes.

 

[NiteWave]

ask your host to enable GeoIP at web server(litespeed) level:
https://www.litespeedtech.com/docs/webserver/config/general#enableIpGeo
and update the GeoIP database every month, then you can block IPs by country easily in .htaccess

there should be 0 performance loss in this way.

you can also install a wordpress plugin regarding GeoIP, and block IPs by country. this way every wordpress site need install this plugin and less efficient than above way. but you can try it at once, and may boost your websites' performance a lot without server level GeoIP.