Remember when you were in school and there was always someone whose reputation came before them, and not always in a good way. Well, much like school the internet has the same thing, and a much longer memory.
If your PC or mail server gets hacked and sends tens of thousands of emails, the public IP address of your internet connection will get a bad reputation. If your public facing website gets hacked and hidden pages are added for delivering malicious content, your website and content will get a bad reputation.
These types of issues can be very harmful to your Internet Reputation, and will impact access to sites, email and a number of things you depend on daily. Many smart firewalls will now simply block connections to sites purely based on reputation scoring.
Sites such as the below are used to check how your IP Address, Email Domain and Web Pages appear to the outside world, there are many that you can subscribe to for automatic alerting if you are added to their list. It is key to protecting your Internet Reputation that you identify and rectify these issues quickly.
WatchGuard Reputation Enabled Defense – Firewall based reporting and blocking for IP Addresses, Countries (Geo) and Content.
http://www.reputationauthority.org/
SPAM Database lookup – Check to see if your IP Address is listed a SPAM Sender.
https://www.dnsbl.info/dnsbl-details.php
http://www.mxtoolbox.com
BrightCloud Threat Intelligence – Website and Content Reputation
http://www.brightcloud.com/tools/url-ip-lookup.php
There are lots more ways of checking your internet reputation, this just provides a snippet of what tools can helps show what is preventing you from accessing or emailing content.
Contact us if you need assistance in checking your Internet Reputation.