We’re excited to announce a powerful new feature designed to keep your website safe: the AntiBot Global Firewall. This sophisticated, automated security service proactively blocks harmful bots and suspicious IP addresses before they can cause any harm to your site. Think of it as a dedicated bouncer for your website—if a threat is on the blocklist, it’s not getting in.
Why This Proactive Protection is Essential
Our AntiBot Global Firewall is a crucial tool for safeguarding your site and ensuring a seamless experience for your visitors. It helps by:
- Keeping Your Site Up and Running: By blocking malicious bots, it reduces server strain, leading to faster loading times and a better user experience.
- Safeguarding Your Content: You won’t have to worry about bots scraping your valuable content or consuming your bandwidth.
- Providing 24/7 Security: The firewall runs continuously in the background, giving you constant protection from suspicious activity so you can focus on growing your business.
How Our Global Firewall Works
The AntiBot Global Firewall operates on a vast threat detection network, analyzing traffic patterns and threat data from hundreds of thousands of websites daily. This network identifies approximately 100,000 suspicious IPs every day, proactively adapting to new threats as they emerge.
Based on this analysis, the system generates a blocklist of over 50,000 harmful IPs daily, which is automatically updated every 12 hours to ensure your site is protected against the latest threats. We identify suspicious IPs based on behaviors such as failed login attempts, accessing non-existent pages, and spamming comments.
All blocked IP addresses are reviewed every seven days to ensure the blocklist remains accurate and up-to-date.
Choose Your Level of Protection
Our Global Firewall offers two modes to give you control over your site’s security:
- Basic Mode: This is your standard, everyday protection. It allows safe bots and tools like uptime monitors and SEO scanners to access your site while still blocking known threats.
- Strict Mode: For situations requiring serious lockdown, Strict Mode ensures that any suspicious activity is blocked, including visits with minor issues like broken links.
You can easily switch between these modes as needed to match your current security requirements. Submit a ticket request to have the security mode switched at any time (currently available for all MCP Customers).
Local Firewall vs. Global Firewall: The Key Difference
A local firewall is a valuable tool, but it’s limited to the rules you manually configure for your specific website. It’s reactive, only blocking an IP after it has already engaged in suspicious behavior on your site.
In contrast, our AntiBot Global Firewall is a “set it and forget it” solution with a much broader scope. It is a proactive, interconnected system that shares threat information across our entire network. If a malicious IP is flagged anywhere, it is automatically blocked from the first visit to your site, offering significantly greater protection and peace of mind.
DDoS Protection and More
When set to Strict Mode, our AntiBot Global Firewall provides full protection against DDoS attacks by stopping hackers before they can overwhelm your server. This server-level blocking prevents malicious traffic from even reaching your website, preserving your resources.
If a legitimate visitor is ever blocked by mistake, you can enable the “Unlock Me” feature. This option allows visitors to regain access by solving an invisible CAPTCHA that distinguishes humans from bots. Additionally, you have the ability to manually add trusted IP addresses to an allowlist to ensure they are never blocked. (You can request to add trusted IP addresses via our customer portal)
All of our clients with Essential MCP Plans or higher automatically benefit from this robust security service. If you have any questions about this new feature, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us directly.
