What is IP Vigilant

IP Vigilant is a piece of software we have created to help keep our platform safe.

The web is full of bad actors. Every day, people are searching for exploitts that they can use to their advantage. This usually involves using automation to search and scan the web looking for websites that are insecure or are running outdated versions of software that have known problems that they can access.

Sometimes it feels like a battle to keep the bad guys out.

We know we have a secure platform. Over the past 6 months, we have migrated all of our web hosting infrastructure to the CloudLinux operating system. This, in effect, creates a caged environment for every user, meaning if they have an exploit, it poses almost no risk to the service in general.

IP Vigilant is our attempt to limit the availability of access to our servers for bad actors looking for exploits in the first place. IPVigilant has access to our main server log files. Once per hour, it reads the logs and checks for IP addresses that are making repeat requests to clients’ websites. By repeat requests, we mean attempting to locate files that are known to be insecure or vulnerable.

We then carry out a lookup on the IP address to see if it has previously been identified as malicious. If so, the IP address is blocked from accessing our servers.

IP Vigilant has been running on our servers for almost 12 months, and it has had a very positive impact. Not only has the impact been direct, but by blocking malicious IP addresses, the total number of IP’s hitting our servers has gradually gone down over time. This is because the people running these exploits will use programming logic to only hit servers that will not act against them. They know our server actively looks for and blocks suspicious IP addresses, so they will allocate more resources to easier targets.

We will continue to develop and improve IP Vigilant to make it available as an open source project at some point in the future.