HYAS Blog

Top 20 Blocked Destination Countries

Written by Dan White | October 15, 2025

HYAS blocks tons of queries on behalf of our clients each day and we occasionally step back and look at the patterns that derive from them. Looking at where blocked traffic was trying to go, we see in this month’s heatmap some familiar infrastructure patterns, in addition to some shifts that likely reflect attacker hosting choices.

Some observations this month:

North America shows dense cloud concentrations, likely due to attackers preferring reliable, low-latency hosting that sits close to enterprise traffic and CDNs. Fast spin-ups and tear-downs appear to help blend with normal service noise.

 

A more visible Middle East footprint may be tied to modern cloud/VPN/proxy exits that tend to resemble business egress; useful for credential harvesting and session replay when geography is used as a rough trust signal.


Germany and the Netherlands function as infrastructure crossroads, consistent with high bandwidth, rich peering, and straightforward provisioning; we often see redirect chains and short-lived staging originating or transiting here.


Hong Kong and Singapore stand out for short-lived staging, usually linked to dense cross-border commerce and abundant VPS options. “Just-in-time” domains tied to finance/auth workflows seem to appear more frequently in these hubs.


Broader activity across Japan, India, Turkey, South Africa, and other countries could suggest some level of deliberate regional diversification. It’s not uncommon for attackers to distribute risk for operational resiliency, test latency to target populations, and exploit providers and infrastructure that may not yet be identified in reputation-based intelligence feeds. We’ll be looking more into the evidence for these going forward.

 

Why it matters

Geography is not an effective security control. Quiet geo-allow rules and “friendly-country” assumptions can not be relied upon in cybersecurity and can become invisible bypass vectors that weakens security. Instead, DNS-layer controls that evaluate destination infrastructure and reputation for you in real time are needed to keep your business moving quickly while also protecting it from a wide range of cyber threats.

 

Where HYAS Protect helps

HYAS Protect leverages our unique infrastructure intelligence and proprietary decision logic to prevent connection to risky destinations and reduce the risk from phishing, infostealers, adversary command and control, and staging chains upstream of compromise. The net effect is fewer incidents, more efficient application of existing security resources and personnel, and a more secure and resilient organization.

Want to learn more? Reach out at hyas.com and try HYAS Protect and HYAS Insight for a free trial period.