3 Ways an IP Geolocation API Can Help with Cybersecurity

by Ip Stack API Marketplace

In this new era, businesses need to be mindful of how their customers and suppliers interact digitally. The internet-connected devices in your network are identifiable by their IP address and usually give geolocation data that is pertinent to a wide range of business processes such as marketing, fraud prevention, network protection, and more.

IP geolocation is key for organizations to strengthen their cybersecurity posture. Given that the world is a digital place and the frequency of cyberattacks is at 11 seconds per attack, geolocation data can help guard against frequent attacks.

This post lists three ways you can protect your company's cybersecurity with IP geolocation information.

An IP geolocation API can help you prioritize alerts.

With more than 1,000 alerts coming their way each day, it's difficult for security teams to keep up. That's why it's important for them to be able to prioritize alerts; that way they can stay more focused on the most important alerts. One way they can do this is by using an IP geolocation API that can help you identify the location from which an alert was sent.

A security specialist can use an IP geolocation API to complement a list of top threats. For example, Spamhaus’s 10 Worst Spam Countries is a list that is constantly updated and provides immediate information on suspicious IP addresses. Security analysts could use this as a guide in order to hone in on countries with the highest volume of threats first.

An IP geolocation API can help you spot cybersecurity trends.

With the help of an IP geolocation API, security researchers can now develop a list of cybercrime hotspots. Finding these is a time-consuming task without the help of an automated and for the most part, instant IP lookup tool. However, it does take some time to pull all this together. This is where an IP geolocation API comes in — a tool that feeds you information on malicious IP addresses based on bulk lookup requests. It’s very simple to use and is a more hassle-free way to identify cybercrime hotspots than manually inspecting a list of up to 100,000 malicious IPs.

If you have an IP geolocation API, then you can discover where a bunch of 762 identified malicious IP addresses connect to. This data can tell you a lot about the trends a hacker follows.

An IP geolocation API can boost your company’s fraud prevention efforts.

In order to keep fraud and cybersecurity at bay, all businesses need to use an IP geolocation API. This data can also help identify suspicious activity by hackers, which will provide companies with more freedom in their fraud prevention efforts. An IP geolocation API can be used not just for networks but for customer databases as well. IP geolocations are vital because buyers may be hiding their identity by using someone else’s IP address on their order. Businesses can put a verification step in place to confirm that the user is the rightful owner of the IP address. One example of this would be a confirmation call. However, this depends on the size of your company, so it’s best to evaluate if this is something that would actually work for you.

If a customer lives in the United States but suddenly makes a huge purchase from South Korea, you might suspect fraud. Let's say you have a customer with an IP address of 1[.]32[.]232[.]0, who then makes a purchase with an IP address of 119[.]193[.]232[.]132. In this case, you might want to call the customer and see if he or she actually made the purchase. If not, report the errant IP address to the authorities.

IP geolocation data can be an invaluable way for organizations to accomplish a number of important tasks. Alerts, security trends, and fraud prevention are just three examples. But companies may find that IP geolocation APIs can help them accomplish even more — for example, by being used in content personalization or for search engine optimization.

ipstack is an API that's designed to help developers use IP address data to create apps. The API creates apps that not only identify web visitors by their IP address, but may also be used to work with geolocation data, store information about cookies, and provide analytics on your site's traffic.