Data center feeds

Traffic from data center IP ranges comes from server infrastructure, not from people. The Media Rating Council (MRC) classifies it as general invalid traffic (GIVT), and filtering it is required to reduce invalid traffic (IVT). Pixalate offers two weekly feeds of data center IP ranges:

• Data Center Data Intelligence Feed: IPv4 ranges.
• Data Center IPv6 Feed: IPv6 ranges.

Use them to block, or alert on, bid requests and other traffic from these ranges before you bid or serve. Use both if you receive IPv6 traffic.

What’s in the feeds

Data Center Data Intelligence Feed (IPv4)

The IPv4 feed includes the IPv4 ranges published by the three largest hosting providers, Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft, which the MRC requires for filtering invalid data center traffic. It also covers externally published lists and ranges that Pixalate curates for major and smaller cloud and hosting providers, including ranges linked to malicious or compromised devices at the data center level.

Data Center IPv6 Feed

The IPv6 feed lists known IPv6 ranges belonging to hosting and cloud infrastructure.

How Pixalate builds the lists

Pixalate curates, validates and evaluates every range. Ranges that providers publish and externally maintained open-source lists are inputs: Pixalate verifies, deduplicates and monitors them before including them, alongside data center ranges found by its own detection.

The lists leave out mixed-use ranges that carry legitimate consumer traffic, such as Apple iCloud Private Relay egress ranges and VPN providers. This follows MRC guidance to exclude routing artifacts of legitimate users.

At a glance

[WeekNum] is the week of the year. It restarts at 1 each new year, and has no leading zero: DatacenterSubnetsWeek1 through DatacenterSubnetsWeek9, then DatacenterSubnetsWeek10, DatacenterSubnetsWeek11 and so on.

For access and how to collect the files, see Delivery and integration.

Schema

Each file is a single column with no header row.

Example IPv4 file (made-up ranges):

198.51.100.0/28
203.0.113.128/25
192.0.2.64/26
198.51.100.200/31
203.0.113.7/32

Example IPv6 file (made-up ranges):

2001:db8:1400::/38
2001:db8:1800::/38
2001:db8:4000::/38
2001:db8:5000:100::/56

Apply the feeds pre-bid

1. Load the latest IPv4 and IPv6 files on the servers that make your bid or serving decisions.
2. For each request, find the IP addresses involved. Check every IP in the X-Forwarded-For header as well as the client IP; see Handle X-Forwarded-For.
3. If an IP falls inside any listed range, block the request.

The ranges have no probability column: an IP inside a listed range is data center traffic.

For IPs whose last octet is missing or set to 0, see Handle a missing or zero last octet.

Check for new files

Both feeds update once a week. On Fridays:

• Check once an hour.
• Download only when a new file is available.
• Stop checking once you’ve found the new file.

Related