Local country database

Country blocking, the Threat Monitor's countries and the new-country login alert all need to know which country an IP address belongs to. Since 5.3.0 MuRu Guard answers that from a database stored on your own server. No visitor IP is sent to any outside service.

Where the data comes from

MuRu Guard downloads the free DB-IP IP to Country Lite database (about 4 MB, published monthly under CC BY 4.0) directly from DB-IP. No account or key is needed. The file is kept in the component's data folder and is never part of the extension package.

When it is downloaded

• When you update to 5.3.0 and country blocking is already on.
• When you save Site Protection with Block by Country switched on and no database is present.
• When you press Download database or Update now under the blocked-countries field.
• Every month during the scheduled scan, once the database is in use.

A new copy is checked before it replaces the old one: it must open, be a country database and answer a known address correctly. If anything fails, the old copy stays.

See its status

In Settings → Site Protection, under the blocked-countries field, a line shows the database date. It turns amber when the database is missing or more than a month old.

If the database is missing or cannot be read, every visitor is treated as "country unknown" and is allowed through. Country blocking never fails closed.

What changed from earlier versions

Before 5.3.0, each new visitor IP was sent over plain HTTP to a free lookup service, which limits how many lookups a site may make and does not allow commercial use, and the results were kept in a file of every visitor IP ever looked up. The update removes that file.

Credit

Country data: IP Geolocation by DB-IP.