A device’s IP address is an essential part of how it communicates online. It tells your Internet Service Provider, would-be hackers, and websites your approximate location. But it can also give away a lot more information, including what websites you visit.

Unfortunately, criminals are using anonymous IP address lists to conceal their identity and hide their activities from detection. As a result, detecting anonymity has become increasingly important for online businesses and to combat cyber-crime. Detecting anonymous IP addresses helps to protect credit card fraud, account takeover attempts, bots & automated behavior, scraping, and other threats.

Anonymous IP Address Lists: What You Need to Know

The most accurate method of identifying a riskier connection is to use an advanced IP reputation data set that includes information about open and anonymous proxies, Tor nodes, VPNs, hosting providers & data centers, and other undesirable shared connections that are known to engage in malicious behavior. The PolicyTech IPQS proxy detection database uses a combination of geo pool, Barracuda IP reputation, and MaxMind IP reputation to easily identify these risks.

Using this information, you can configure your Barracuda Web Application Firewall to automatically block traffic from a particular list of suspicious IPs. This can help to prevent spam and other attacks from being sent to your customers, or from a single customer causing a massive denial of service attack for all of your clients.