cPHulk now allows Countries Whitelisting and Blacklisting
Have you ever used a 3rd party plugin for enabling a complete country blacklist or are you looking for a simple yet effective solution to block access based on countries? If yes, you can now get rid of the plugin as this feature has been added to the cPanel core. cPHulk has managed to get a makeover with advanced country based protection.
Recently, there have been many major changes with the cPanel Web Control Panel and now with the latest version v70.0.42, cPanel has moved ahead with adding the long awaited feature of blocking a complete country from accessing the server. The cPHulk protection system within cPanel has now been modified with some added functionalities including whitelisting and blacklisting of a complete country. That is a good news for server owners who receive large amount of failed logins and brute force attacks from specific countries where they dont sell their product or services and are happy enough to just blacklist the entire country.
As you can see from the above capture, there is a new tab in cPHulk for managing country level blocking, adding both the option to whitelist and blacklist. The blacklisting feature in cPHulk, as we already discussed, will allow server management team to block country level access. On the other hand, the whitelisting feature will also be helpful in allowing connections from specific countries to be always bypassed from any blocking including multiple failed login attempts / brute force attacks. This might come handy when you have a large user base from specific country and do not want those audiences to be blocked from any reason. Personally, I do not see the whitelisting as much effective as for the reason that adding any country to whitelist will allow attackers to use VPN connections to bypass any lockouts. Moreover, blacklisting and whitelisting can be used by content providers who want to only allow one or two countries to access their premium content and keep other counties away from accessing the system.
All in all, website/server owners now have much more control over allowing/denying access on country level.