Whitelisting and Blacklisting IP addresses

[NotionCommotion]

First of all, I acknowledge that my solution below is just a weak crutch for not better security, but it might be all I am capably of...

 

Stupid idea?  If even worth pursuing, recommendations of the 3rd party service to query bad IPs?

<?php

//index.php

function verifyWhiteListedIP($ip)
{
    //Query local database to ensure that this IP has been recently verifed as not being bad, and return true or false.
    return true;    //or false
}

function verifyIP($ip)
{
    // Query some 3rd party DB to see if it has been blacklisted, and return true if okay, else delete from whitelist DB and return false.
    return true;    //or false
}

function confirmWhiteListIPs()
{
    // Will be called on a 24 hour cron job, and will verify whitelisted IPs are still nice using the above mentioned 3rd party DB, and delete if not
}

if(whitelisted($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) || verifyIP($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'])){
    //Return HTML, JSON, etc.
}
else {sayGoodby();}

[Jacques1]

Which problem are you trying to solve? Spam? Excessive scraping? A security-related issue?

 

Completely blocking IPs based on the decision of a third-party service is, obviously, problematic, because an IP can represent anything from a single client to thousands of (innocent) users. In the worst case, you end up with a self-inflicted denial-of-service attack.

 

There are specific cases where the risk can be justified with a significant benefit (e. g. using the blacklists of The Spamhaus Project to prevent e-mail spam), but it's impossible to give any advice without knowing the context.

[NotionCommotion]

Which problem are you trying to solve? Spam? Excessive scraping? A security-related issue?

 

Maybe none.  I just look at my Apache log, and see suspect IPs attempting to access, and it just stresses me out.

[Jacques1]

If it's a public site, it's only natural that you get requests from all over the world and from all kinds of IP addresses. You can start worrying when the clients actually do something suspicious.