Almost everything connected to the Internet has an IP address, which serves as its “neighborhood” on the web. Like a credit score, your IP reputation is an indicator of how trustworthy your online activity and behavior is. A history of non-malicious activities and relationships with legitimate websites will lead to a positive reputation; whereas, being associated with bulk spam, dangerous domains or suspicious locations will damage your reputation.
Your reputation can determine how often you are blocked or your email delivered, whether you can buy products or services online, verify users or make payments, and more. Having a bad reputation can cause your marketing emails to be marked as spam or even completely blocked from being delivered, which can have significant repercussions for businesses that depend on email to communicate with their audience.
The good news is that there are a number of tools available to help you check your IP reputation. These tools can be used to understand the reputation of your own IP address, as well as the reputation of your email sender. Ultimately, it is critical that you monitor your email reputation on a regular basis to ensure that your marketing messages are reaching their intended recipients.
Using Machine Learning to Measure Your IP Reputation Risk Score
Many of the current IP reputation IP reputation risk score services use blocklists as their foundational threat detection, which are static and cannot be updated to include new malicious actors in real-time. To overcome the limitations of these services, ipdata uses machine learning to provide an up-to-the-minute risk score for each IP address in its feed. This scoring model provides a much more accurate assessment of the threat level, and it is updated every time a malicious pattern is detected on an individual IP address.
An IP Reputation Score Can Be a Vital Tool for Network Administrators
As cyber criminals continue to find ways to compromise systems, small businesses and MSPs need to have access to timely and accurate tools to enforce safe web usage policies and ensure that only approved content is allowed onto their networks. Untangle’s Threat Prevention application is an IP reputation service that scans the behavior of each IP address and determines its reputation based on a multitude of factors, including whether it’s been associated with malware or other suspicious activity in the past. This information is then used to block or grant access to web and application-based content on the NG Firewall.
Untangle’s Threat Prevention app is available for all NG Firewall customers, and its IP reputation score is calculated in the background as each IP address is scanned. The score is based on a combination of the above-mentioned categories of behaviors and other criteria, such as if an IP address has been associated with malware in the past or if it’s been observed trying to download threats from phishing sites. As the number of available IP addresses increases from 4.3 billion to approximately 340 undecillion with the rollout of IPv6, it will be increasingly difficult for traditional IP reputation services to keep pace with the sheer volume of potential malicious activity.