Why do you need this? You can't use it for legal reasons (since you can't be precisely accurate). Are you just curious about hits?

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

No i am not just curious. The policy of my employer is: block people of countries from signing up to our member areas, if there are too many hackers...
I hope you see the point. The 5-10% is acceptable for them, and they know it is not completely accurate.
I know it is not very ethic, but my job is just to create code... :)

-- tune

I don't get it. Your boss imagines that certain countries contain more hackers than others? What is this based on? Anyway, since you're the programmer, you should do your best to make the system impenetrable and give him assurances of this. Wasting your time on tracing IPs is not worth your time since the good hackers
1. Don't come in bushels.
2. Mask the real source of the attack.
Frankly, I can't see what you hope to accomplish.


AgentM Systems nor Nasca Enterprises nor Bone::Easy nor Macperl is responsible for the comments made by AgentM. Remember, you can build any logical system with NOR.

I see a little problem there: It seems to me that - probably having the biggest density of internet users per capita - the US would also have the largest number of hackers. Would you then have to block that country too?

(Nota Bene: I have no statistics to back this. Just a guess)

Brother Ade

I've done this by hand using whois lookups to whois.ripe.net, whois.arin.net and whois.apnic.net which cover everyone. This is time consuming in the extreme though!

Recently I discovered http://ipindex.dragonstar.net/ which is a complete whois lookup on all possible ip addresses. I was contemplating downloading the info on the site, parsing it to produce a perl module which you could give an IP address to and it would return a country. This would be instant too!

That is extremely insecure. I understand how this may give you a sense of security, but logging into your website from Russia via SpaceProxy completely defeats the purpose of this check. In effect, it is faster to bypass the check than it takes to actually perform the check! It is very dangerous to rely heavily on such services.


AgentM Systems nor Nasca Enterprises nor Bone::Easy nor Macperl is responsible for the comments made by AgentM. Remember, you can build any logical system with NOR.

I agree with you that this check isn't fool/hacker proof. However it is useful as an additional check. Believe me I've been there and had to deal with the chargebacks ;-)

If you are talking about credit card transactions (which I was) then you are talking about secure transactions via https which in general aren't proxied.

Of course most anyone technical can hide their true IP address but in our case that wasn't the sort of person we were dealing with.