About us

isipsafe started the way a lot of useful tools do: somebody looked at a server's login log one morning and thought, there has to be a better way to deal with this.

Any machine with a public IP address gets attacked within minutes of going online. Nobody is targeting it personally; it is just there. Botnets cycle through the whole IPv4 space trying default passwords, asking for /.env, poking at old WordPress plugins. Every admin sees the same addresses, and every admin deals with them alone.

We think that is a waste. If a hundred servers have already seen an address try four thousand passwords, the hundred-and-first should not have to find out the hard way. So we built a place to write it down.

What we do

We run a public database of abusive IP addresses. Anyone can look up an address. People who sign in, which is free, can report the ones that attack them and download the worst of them as a blocklist. Reports are scored by how many independent people saw the same thing recently, so a single grudge cannot get an address listed and old sins fade.

The website, the API and the blocklist are free. We would rather have a thousand small servers reporting than a handful of paying customers.

How we think about it

• Evidence over opinion. A report should describe something that actually happened. We ask for log lines, not adjectives.
• Recent over historic. IP addresses change hands. The score looks at the last 30 days and lets the past go.
• Easy to report, easy to correct. A free account and one curl command to report. One click to withdraw a mistaken report. A real person reads delisting requests.
• Collect as little as we can. We do not store visitors' addresses for rate limiting, only a keyed hash; we do not use advertising trackers, and we never show reporters' names. See the privacy policy.
• Boring technology. One Go binary, one Postgres database. It is fast and it stays up.

Who runs it

A small team of engineers who have spent years running infrastructure and security tooling. This is the service we wished existed. The legal details are in the terms.

If you want to help, the best thing you can do is wire up your servers so they report what they see. If you want to talk, get in touch.

The isipsafe team