As your site grows, it is critical to be able to identify visitors — whether they are humans or bots — in order to take the correct steps to prevent hacking, account abuse and other bad activity. But identifying website users can be challenging, especially as more and more users adopt online privacy features to hide their digital footprint. These methods are both legitimate and malicious, creating an ever-evolving balancing act between respecting real visitors’ online privacy and the needs of websites and apps that rely on these features to function properly.
One Secure your website by blocking anonymous users way to secure your site is to block anonymous users, which can help prevent access by those who could be harmful. However, this can impact your site’s performance and accessibility by blocking users who are trying to authenticate using a proxy or VPN.
Similarly, it can be necessary to allow access to certain user accounts if they are not the site administrator. For example, this can be a necessary security measure for customer support and community forums where the ability to create new application passwords is required. This can prevent attackers from reusing a stolen password for other accounts.
What Can an IP Address Reveal
Many website and app owners rely on web application firewalls (WAF) to protect their sites from malicious bot attacks. Unfortunately, these systems rely on rigid rules to determine the legitimacy of traffic, which may not be accurate for advanced, programmatic attack vectors. Furthermore, WAFs can also restrict access to important functionality if they incorrectly determine that an authenticated visitor is not a valid bot.