Every device connected to the internet needs a unique IP address. These addresses are used to identify hosts on a network, and can be traced back to their providers and locations.

Cybercriminals use IP addresses as a means of tracking users online and stealing personal information that they can later sell or sell to third parties. The information stolen from a victim could include their birthdate, phone number, bank account number and social security number.

Fraudsters also use  high risk IP addresses as a form of cover to hide their identity and conduct transactions without being detected by geolocation tools or other systems. This can be accomplished by using anonymous proxies, or even by creating fake IP addresses that look like a public network.

The problem is that these types of fake addresses are difficult to detect. In addition, many businesses aren’t collecting and analyzing user IP address activity. That’s why it’s critical to use a tool that combines the data from IP addresses with other metrics in order to create a risk score.

High risk IP addresses can deliver threats to your infrastructure and endpoints, including TOR nodes, botnets, and other malicious actors. They can also host malware that enables hackers to carry out attacks on your networks.

BrightCloud’s IP Reputation Service uses a big data architecture to provide up-to-the-minute intelligence on dangerous IPs. This intelligence can help you block traffic from TOR nodes, proxies, and other malicious actors that are delivering threats to your network and endpoints.

This is done by comparing an IP’s reputation with that of other similar IPs. It also evaluates if the IP has previously sent messages that have been identified as spam, or hosted malware.

Unlike traditional IP validation, which relies on the user’s own network configurations, BrightCloud IP Reputation uses machine learning to assess the probability that an IP is bad or not. This is because it takes into consideration the history of how the IP has performed in the past, and how it might perform in the future.

It also factors in the origin of the IP, which is based on whether the IP is from a TOR network exit node or behind an anonymous/elite proxy. It also checks for country blacklists and whether the IP is associated with suspicious/spam activity.

When a high risk IP is detected, a threat prevention rule is automatically enabled to block that traffic from your organization. This is a preventative measure that can protect your organization from incoming and outgoing traffic that contains these IPs, but it can also cause false positives if you aren’t able to block all suspicious traffic.

The BrightCloud IP Reputation Index provides a predictive risk score for each individual IP, which falls into one of five rating bands, ranging from trustworthy to malicious. Numerically lower scores indicate that the IP is more likely to be or become bad, and are monitored at a higher frequency than trustworthy IPs.

With the IP Reputation Index, you can easily see which activities are considered low-risk or high-risk and then make an informed decision on how to proceed. Whether you’re a bank, merchant, digital service provider, ISP, authorization service or security solution provider, the risk score can help you make the right call on which high-risk transactions to accept or reject.