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There is no responsible, universal list of countries that every website should block. A country-wide firewall rule is a blunt control: it blocks legitimate visitors, support staff, travelers, VPN users, cloud services, and sometimes your own customers along with unwanted traffic.
The right list comes from your logs, business requirements, regulatory obligations, and the locations from which attacks are actually arriving. If a country has no legitimate reason to reach a particular application and produces repeated abuse, blocking it may be reasonable. Otherwise, start with monitoring, rate limiting, bot controls, authentication, or a rule aimed at a specific path.
When country blocking makes sense
Country blocking is most defensible when the application has a narrow geographic audience or when a country is clearly outside the service’s operating area. Examples include:
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- An internal portal intended only for employees in one or two countries.
- A regional service that cannot legally or commercially serve certain jurisdictions.
- A login or administration endpoint receiving persistent automated attacks from locations with no legitimate users.
- A temporary incident-response measure while you investigate a campaign.
- Compliance or sanctions requirements, subject to legal review.
For a public website, country blocking should usually be a last-mile restriction rather than the first security measure. Attackers can use VPNs, proxies, compromised devices, cloud hosting, and residential proxy networks. Conversely, legitimate users can appear to come from another country when using a corporate VPN or mobile carrier.
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Countries you should block: use evidence, not a copied list
Cloudflare does not publish a universal blacklist. Its documentation shows the rule mechanics using North Korea (KP) and Syria (SY) as examples, not as a recommendation that every site should block those countries.
Build your own decision from these questions:
- Do you have legitimate users there? Check customer records, support tickets, payment activity, employees, contractors, and partners.
- What exactly is being attacked? A country block may be unnecessary if the abuse is limited to
/wp-login.php, an API route, or a password-reset endpoint. - Is the traffic consistently abusive? Review denied requests, authentication failures, request rates, user agents, ASN data, and targeted URLs over several days.
- Can a narrower rule solve it? Consider rate limiting, bot detection, an IP or ASN rule, stronger authentication, or blocking only a sensitive path.
- What is the business and legal impact? Confirm that the block does not conflict with contracts, accessibility commitments, support arrangements, or local requirements.
A practical decision table
| Situation | Better first choice | When a country block may be justified |
|---|---|---|
| Public marketing site with noisy scans | Managed WAF rules, bot controls, rate limits | Rarely; only if the traffic is persistent and geographically concentrated |
| Employee administration portal | VPN, identity-aware access, MFA, allowlisted networks | As an additional layer when the user population is geographically limited |
| Regional ecommerce service | Application-level eligibility and payment controls | When the service genuinely cannot operate in a country |
| Active attack from a location with no legitimate users | Temporary WAF rule and incident monitoring | As a short-term containment measure, with an expiry or review date |
How country matching works
Cloudflare and AWS WAF classify a request using the source IP’s geolocation. This is not a guaranteed identification of the person’s physical country, nationality, or organization. GeoIP accuracy varies by country and by IP type, and some requests cannot be located. AWS represents an unknown country with XX.
Expect false positives from VPNs, proxies, mobile networks, satellite providers, corporate egress points, and incorrectly geolocated IP addresses. Test a proposed rule in a logging or challenge mode where your provider supports it, then review real requests before switching to a hard block.
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Block countries with Cloudflare WAF
Cloudflare’s current method is a WAF Custom rule. Do not follow older instructions that tell you to create a new Firewall Rule; Cloudflare treats Firewall Rules as deprecated legacy functionality.
Block selected countries
- Open the Cloudflare dashboard and select the zone.
- Go to Security rules → Create rule → Custom rules.
- Enter a rule name, such as
Block countries with no service coverage. - Under When incoming requests match, choose the country field. The expression field is
ip.src.country. - Use the country’s two-character code. For the documented North Korea and Syria example, use:
(ip.src.country in {"KP" "SY"})- Under Then take action, choose Block.
- Choose Deploy to activate the rule, or Save as Draft if you need to review it first.
Replace the example codes with the countries your evidence and business policy identify. Country values use two-character country codes; they are not country names written in English.
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Allow only selected countries
If an application is genuinely regional, an allow-list can be clearer than maintaining a growing block-list. For example, Cloudflare documents this expression for allowing only the United States and Mexico:
(not ip.src.country in {"US" "MX"})Set the action to Block. This denies every country other than those two, so it deserves more testing than a small deny-list. Make sure your monitoring, payment provider, staff VPN, and third-party integrations can still reach the application.
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A safer rule often limits the scope instead of blocking every request from a country. For example, apply a country condition only to a login path, an administration hostname, or requests that also exceed a rate threshold. Cloudflare also supports country, continent, and ASN fields. Its documented geographical expression combines those fields like this:
(ip.src.asnum eq 131279) or (ip.src.continent eq "AS") or (ip.src.country eq "KP")Be careful with or: this expression blocks a request if any of the three conditions matches. Use parentheses and test the expression before deployment.
Cloudflare plan and rule-order considerations
- Custom rules are available on Free, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans.
- Per-zone limits are currently 5 rules on Free, 20 on Pro, 100 on Business, and 1,000 on Enterprise.
- Regex is unavailable on Free and Pro and available on Business and Enterprise. Regex is not normally required for country matching.
- Custom rules are evaluated in order. An earlier terminating action such as Block can prevent later rules from being evaluated.
- Cloudflare recommends Custom rules instead of IP Access rules for IP- or geography-based blocking.
Cloudflare IP Access rules are available on all plans, but country blocking through that feature is Enterprise-only. The current path is Security rules → Create rule → IP access rules; the option appears only after at least one IP Access rule has been configured.
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Do not mix allow rules casually. An allowed IP or ASN in Cloudflare IP Access rules bypasses custom rules, rate-limiting rules, WAF Managed Rules, and deprecated Firewall Rules. An allowed country through IP Access rules bypasses custom rules, rate-limiting rules, and deprecated Firewall Rules, but not WAF Managed Rules. A globally allowed IP also overrides a country block made through IP Access rules, but not a country block made through a Custom rule.
Blocked response and troubleshooting
A normal Cloudflare block returns HTTP 403. Custom responses are available on Pro and higher plans; a custom status must be in the 400–499 range and the response body is limited to 2 KB.
If a request still reaches the origin, check that:
- The DNS record is proxied through Cloudflare rather than set to DNS-only.
- The rule is deployed in the correct zone.
- The expression uses the correct country code and field.
- An earlier rule, an allow rule, or an origin-side exception is affecting the result.
- Your test request is not coming through a VPN, proxy, or another egress location.
If you use server-side fail2ban, ensure the origin restores the real visitor IP in its logs. Otherwise, it can mistakenly ban Cloudflare’s own edge IP addresses.
Block countries with AWS WAF
AWS WAF uses a Geographic match rule statement. In the rule builder, the relevant request option is Originates from a country in.
- Open the AWS WAF console and select the web ACL protecting the relevant resource.
- Create or edit a rule and add a Geo match statement.
- Select the countries to match. AWS uses ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes, such as
USandCN. Hong Kong isHK. - Give the rule a terminating action of Block, or use the geo statement inside a larger rule.
- Set the rule priority so that exceptions and related rules are evaluated in the intended order.
- Save the web ACL and monitor sampled requests and metrics after deployment.
The equivalent country list in a rule configuration is represented like this:
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["US","CN"]By default, AWS WAF geolocates the request’s origin IP. If your architecture has a trusted proxy that supplies the client address, you can enable Forwarded IP configuration and specify a header such as X-Forwarded-For. AWS uses the first address in that header. You must also choose fallback behavior for malformed addresses: match or no match. Only trust a forwarded header that your own edge or load balancer overwrites; a client can otherwise forge it.
Allow exceptions for specific IP addresses
AWS documents a useful pattern for allowing particular IPs inside otherwise blocked countries:
- Create a terminating Block rule.
- Use an AND statement.
- Add a geo match statement for the blocked countries.
- Add a nested NOT statement containing an IP set statement for the approved addresses.
Conceptually, the rule means: block when the request is from one of these countries and its IP is not in the approved set. Keep the IP set maintained and restrict exceptions to stable, trusted addresses.
AWS geo labels and rule order
A geo match statement adds country and region labels to every inspected request, whether or not the request matches the selected countries. AWS adds those labels at the end of that rule’s evaluation. Therefore, a label-matching condition must be in a separate, later rule; it cannot reliably consume the label earlier in the same rule. AWS also requires a country code even when the purpose of the geo match rule is only to generate labels for later region matching.
CloudFront geographic restrictions versus AWS WAF
CloudFront has its own geographic restriction feature. It blocks disallowed requests before they are forwarded to AWS WAF, so those blocked requests do not reach or get inspected by AWS WAF.
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Use CloudFront restrictions when you need a straightforward distribution-level geographic boundary. Use an AWS WAF geo match statement when geography must be combined with other WAF conditions, such as an IP set exception, a URI path, a header, or a rate-based rule. Do not assume a CloudFront restriction is simply another AWS WAF rule: its position in the request path is different, and AWS WAF will not provide logs for requests stopped before it.
How to roll out a country block safely
- Record the reason. Note the affected service, countries, evidence, owner, and review date.
- Start narrow. Apply the rule to the attacked hostname or path if possible rather than the entire account or site.
- Check dependencies. Test payment gateways, monitoring, webhooks, APIs, support tools, staff VPNs, and search-engine or partner traffic.
- Deploy with an observation period. Use logs, metrics, sampled requests, or a non-blocking action where available.
- Test from representative networks. Include a normal local connection, a mobile connection, a corporate VPN, and a known proxy if those are relevant to your users.
- Keep an exception process. Document how a legitimate user can be restored without weakening the whole rule.
- Review the rule. GeoIP data changes, business coverage changes, and attack patterns change. Remove temporary blocks that no longer serve a purpose.
Alternatives to blocking an entire country
- Protect the endpoint: Require MFA, lock out suspicious authentication attempts, and protect password-reset flows.
- Rate-limit: Limit requests to login, search, checkout, and API routes rather than blocking all site traffic.
- Use bot management: Challenge or deny automated behavior based on signals beyond geography.
- Block an ASN or IP set: This can be more precise when abuse comes from a hosting provider or a small set of networks.
- Use an allow-list for private applications: A VPN or identity-aware proxy is generally stronger than relying on country alone.
- Require application authorization: Country controls do not replace authentication, authorization, input validation, patching, or secure secrets management.
FAQ
What countries should I block on my firewall?
There is no universal answer. Block a country only when your service has no legitimate need to accept traffic from it and your logs show a meaningful security, business, or legal reason. Cloudflare’s examples of KP and SY are rule examples, not a global blacklist.
Does country blocking identify a visitor’s actual location?
No. It classifies the source IP using a geolocation database. VPNs, proxies, mobile carriers, cloud networks, and incorrect GeoIP records can make the result differ from the person’s physical location.
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Yes. Cloudflare Custom rules are available on Free, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans, subject to each plan’s rule limit. Country blocking through Cloudflare IP Access rules is Enterprise-only.
Should I use Cloudflare Firewall Rules for a new country block?
No. Cloudflare identifies Firewall Rules as deprecated legacy functionality. Use Security rules → Create rule → Custom rules.
How do I allow one IP from a blocked country?
In Cloudflare, carefully design rule order and avoid an unintended IP Access-rule bypass. In AWS WAF, use a Block rule with an AND statement containing the blocked-country geo match and a NOT statement containing an IP set for approved addresses.
What does AWS WAF do when it cannot determine a country?
AWS WAF uses the country code XX in its generated geo labels. Decide explicitly whether unknown locations should be allowed, challenged, monitored, or blocked; do not assume XX means a particular country.
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Do not begin with a copied country blacklist. Begin with the application’s real audience and observed abuse, then choose the narrowest control that solves the problem. For Cloudflare, use a WAF Custom rule such as (ip.src.country in {"KP" "SY"}) only after replacing the example codes with your own justified list. For AWS, use a Geo match statement, and use CloudFront geographic restrictions only when you want filtering to happen before AWS WAF. Recheck false positives, exceptions, rule order, and business requirements after deployment.
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