Blocking IP ranges

How to tell what I'm really blocking

[MatthewHSE]

Say I'm getting requests from the IP addresses of '123.456.789.012' and '123.456.123.456' that look malicious, and I want to block them. I look up the geographical location of the IP's and find they're located in the country of, say, Spamavia. Folks in Spamavia aren't my customers, so since malicious requests are originating from their country, I'd like to just block everyone in the country from accessing my site.

How do I do it? I could add the following line to my .htaccess file...

deny from 123.456

But how can I tell I'm only blocking people from Spamavia and not people from, say, Bluefrogopia too? And furthermore, how can I tell if

123.456

will block all of Spamavia, instead of just the Phishopolis region of the country?

In other words, how can I block enough, but not too much, and how can I verify how much I really am blocking?

[Wlauzon]

See [meta.wikimedia.org...]