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Plesk User Guide

Plesk can be used by two types of user:

  • Hosting providers
  • Domain owners/admins

Using the Blackwall Extension - Hosting Providers

  1. Log in to your Plesk account and in the left sidebar, click Blackwall Protection. This sidebar link appears automatically following installation of the extension in admin accounts. Alternatively, from the left sidebar, click Extensions, then My Extensions tab, scroll the listed extensions until you find the newly added Blackwall extension, and finally click the Blackwall extension. plesk-integration-step-10.png
  2. When the Blackwall extension page displays, select the Dashboard tab.
  3. In the Range dropdown, you can select a pre-defined time period using the date selector. Choose from Last Hour, Last Day, Last Week, or Last Month.
  4. Alternatively, in the previous step choose Bespoke. Then in the Start Date and End Date fields, define a custom time period using the date selectors.
  5. Click Filter Statistics to filter all statistics. All widgets on the page instantly refresh to show data filtered for the time period selected.
  6. Use the widgets displayed at the top of the page to keep up to date with your basic security metrics. The first pie chart in this widget includes the number of bots processed, along with the proportion of this number passed or blocked by Blackwall checks. The second pie chart in the widget provides a proportional breakdown between good bots, bad bots, and humans.
  7. Use the Bot Classification widget displayed centrally on the page to visualise bot activity against each classification. This widget uses a bar chart to show the number of requests categorized for easch classification. Each category bar is divided into Passed and Blocked portions, indicating whether the bot traffic was allowed or mitigated. This visualization helps analyse which bot types are most active and how mitigation is being applied across different categories.
  8. Use the Bot Classification widget displayed at the bottom of the page to view bot interceptions (both good and bad) in chronolgical order.

Using the Blackwall Extension - Domain Owners

After enabling protection, you can use the plugin in the same way as users of the main Blackwall platform. All data is automatically synchronized with your Blackwall account. Apart from the appearance of the plugin's user interface, the functionality is largely identical to your Blackwall account.

  1. Log into your Plesk account.
  2. From the left sidebar, select Websites & Domains. plesk-6.png
  3. Scroll the list of domains displayed until you find the one that you are looking for. Alternatively, use the Find domain search field at the top right of the page.
  4. Click the Blackwall icon that corresponds with your desired domain listing.

  5. When the Blackwall Protection page displays for your selected domain, the Statistics tab is displayed by default. Click on any of the tabs available:

    • Statistics
    • Events
    • Settings
    • Rules
    • Rulesets
    • Custom Rules

Statistics

In the context of the Blackwall platform, Statistics are metrics relating to actions, activities, or occurrences that the platform tracks and analyzes to determine whether traffic is generated by a human or a bot. These metrics provide a visual insight into overall performance relating to your selected website asset. In the Plesk extension, to access and configure Statistics for a selected website asset, perform the following tasks:

  1. Repeat steps 1-4 from the above section Using the Blackwall Extension - Domain Owners/Admins.
  2. Click the Statistics tab. plesk-11.png
  3. In the Range dropdown field, you can select a pre-defined time period using the date selector. Choose from Last Hour, Last Day, Last Week, or Last Month.
  4. Alternatively, in the previous step choose Bespoke. Then in the Start Date and End Date fields, define a custom time period using the date selectors.
  5. Click Filter Statistics to filter all statistics. All widgets on the page instantly refresh to show data filtered for the time period selected.
  6. Use the widget displayed at the top of the page to keep up to date with your basic security metrics. This widget includes the number of bots processed, along with the proportion of this number that were passed or blocked by Blackwall checks.
  7. Use the Bot Classification widget displayed centrally on the page to visualise bot activity against each classification. This widget uses a bar chart to show the number of requests categorized for easch classification. Each category bar is divided into Passed and Blocked portions, indicating whether the bot traffic was allowed or mitigated. This visualization helps analyse which bot types are most active and how mitigation is being applied across different categories.

Events

In the context of the Blackwall platform, events are the actions, activities, or occurrences that the platform tracks and analyzes to determine whether traffic is generated by a human or a bot. Events are fundamental to Blackwall's detection capabilities, as they provide the raw data needed to make critical decisions about suspicious or malicious behavior. To access and view the Events tab for all your listed assets, perform the following tasks:

  1. Repeat steps 1-4 from the above section Using the Blackwall Extension - Domain owners/admins.
  2. Click the Events tab. plesk-12.png
  3. Optionally, define a time period.
    • In the Range dropdown field, you can select a pre-defined time period using the date selector. Choose from Last Hour, Last Day, Last Week, or Last Month.
    • Alternatively, in the Range dropdown field, choose Bespoke. Then in the Start Date and End Date fields, define a custom time period using the date selectors.
  4. Optionally, populate the conditional filter fields to filter events according to defined logic.
    1. In the Choose Field dropdown, select a data attribute to filter on.
    2. In the Logical Condition field, select from the following operators: equals, not equals, contains, not contains, any of, or matches regex.
    3. In the Field Value field (which can be a text field or dropdown field depending on the Logical Condition selected in the previous step) select or input the value to use with your selected logical filter.
  5. Click Filter Statistics to filter all statistics. All widgets on the page instantly refresh to show data filtered for the configured filters.
  6. Review the events listed in the resulting table. The table displays various attributes associated with each event, including Date/Time stamp for an event, the URL and IP address associated with the event, the Country of origin for the event, the User Agent string sent by the web browser responsible, the Category of bot, and finally the Mitigation adopted (if any).

Settings

The Settings page provides controls to activate or adjust performance, caching, and security options, helping you to enhance website protection and improve user experience. To access and use the Settings tab:

  1. Repeat steps 1-4 from the above section Using the Blackwall Extension - Domain owners/admins.
  2. Click the Settings tab. plesk-13.png
  3. Optionally, place a check in each checkbox that correspond with the optional settings that you wish to activate/enable, or remove a checkbox to disable the associated setting:
    1. Enable the protection checkbox to enable/disable Blackwall protection for your selected website or domain.
    2. Enable HTTP/3 - GateKeeper will speak HTTP/3 (QUIC/UDP) to compatible clients, improving performance on modern browsers and mobile devices. Leave unchecked if you need to disable HTTP/3 for compatibility or DDoS concerns.
      • Enable Early Hints - Allows GateKeeper to send HTTP 103 “Early Hints” responses during the initial TLS handshake, so that browsers can start preloading resources (e.g., CSS/JS) before the final HTML is delivered. This improves load times, leading to a faster browsing experience.
    4. Force HTTPS - Enable to automatically redirect all incoming HTTP (port 80) requests to HTTPS (port 443). When checked, GateKeeper also adds security headers to encourage browsers to use only HTTPS.
    5. Enable static resources caching - If checked, GateKeeper caches images, CSS, JavaScript, and other static files locally on the edge. This speeds up asset delivery and reduces load on your origin server.
    6. Enable dynamic resources caching - If checked, GateKeeper also caches HTML pages and other 'dynamic' content for a configurable short period. Use with caution: caching dynamic content may cause delays in showing newly published data (e.g., blog posts, user-specific pages).
    7. Mitigate DDoS attacks - Limits the number of simultaneous connections and the rate of requests from a single IP to help prevent volumetric or application-layer DDoS floods. Requires bot protection enabled first.
    8. Advanced DDoS protection - If enabled (and if bot protection is already on), GateKeeper will block attacking IPs at the firewall level for the entire cluster—returning a TCP RST or UDP rejection instead of serving HTTP 403 pages. Use this only if your site has experienced large-scale DDoS events.
  4. Once you have made all changes to your available settings, click OK to save your changes.

Rules

The Rules tab enables you to control how different categories of traffic are treated. It allows you to grant, deny, or challenge access for groups such as search engines, social networks, cloud services, humans, and malicious automation. To access and use the Rules tab:

  1. Repeat steps 1-4 from the above section Using the Blackwall Extension - Domain owners/admins.
  2. Click the Settings tab. plesk-14.png
  3. From the eight core rules displayed, locate the rule that you wish to modify. For the rule that you choose to modify, select a checkbox that corresponds to your desired behaviour. The available checkboxes are:
    • Grant access
    • Deny access
    • Use CAPTCHA (only available on some rules)
  4. Click OK** to save your changes.

Default Core Rule settings

Blackwall's Core Rule settings in Plesk are initially all set to Grant access to allow all traffic by default. Make sure to change these rules to best suit your needs.

Rulesets

The Rulesets tab allows users to enable platform-specific exclusions. These preset rules help reduce false positives by automatically adapting bot-protection behaviour for common CMS and web application frameworks. To access and configure the Ruleset tab:

  1. Repeat steps 1-4 from the above section Using the Blackwall Extension - Domain owners/admins.
  2. Click the Ruleset tab. plesk-15.png
  3. Locate the ruleset that you wish to switch on or off.
  4. From the ten rulesets displayed, locate the ruleset that you wish to modify. Then place a check in the corresponding checkbox to enable the ruleset, or remove the check from the checkbox to disable it.
  5. Click OK** to save your changes.

Custom Rules

Custom Rules are different to Blackwall's Core Rules. Whilst our default Core Rules greatly decrease bot traffic for your website(s), some visitor behavior might still present a cause for concern. This is where our Custom Rules engine can help you to eliminate those visitors from accessing your website. The Custom Rules engine may be used for bespoke purposes, but the main two purposes are:

  • Whitelisting (unblocking) of currently blocked services and clients.
  • Blocking of services and clients that currently have access to your site.

To access and configure the Custom Rules tab:

  1. Repeat steps 1-4 from the above section Using the Blackwall Extension - Domain owners/admins.
  2. Click the Custom Rules tab. plesk-16.png
  3. In the Add custom rule #1 section, name your rule, by typing a unique name into the Rule name field.
  4. Set the trigger Conditions for your rule:
    1. In the Field dropdown menu, select from the listed criteria.
      Click to review the criteria options
      • Autonomous System Number - type the AS number using numbers only, but do not include a prefix with AS/ASN abbreviations.
      • User-Agent - the corresponding HTTP header, which is sent by any software that makes a request to your server. You could use this condition to block/allow requests from various browsers, like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox (or their mobile versions), CLI tools like wget or curl, programming languages libraries, like Urllib or requests in Python, Go Http Client, libwww-perl, etc. You can also try exploring the world of various User-Agents to get more examples via special databases. We recommend checking out whatismybrowser.com or useragentstring.com.
      • Country Code - used to restrict access based on visitor geography.
      • IP Address - our advice is to whitelist administrator/developer/QA IP addresses (IPv4 or IPv6 - Blackwall supports both). These people often use custom software and send unusual requests to the site, which might be blocked otherwise. Please be sure to whitelist your site’s uptime monitor IP address. This condition supports CIDR notation to list IP subnets, like 123.123.123.123/24. You can also easily list different subnets in a single rule using the ‘Is any of’ match type (separating each subnet with a comma followed by a space, for example: first, second, third, ).
      • Referrer URL - a browser sends the location of where a link to your site was clicked in a special "Referer HTTP Header. One common Custom Rule, which might be useful for you, is to block visitors with an empty ‘Referer’ header. When the ‘Referer’ header is empty, it means that the client made a direct request to the site, and didn’t follow any link or perform any search request prior to the visit. Most of the time it’s fine, because it means the user typed your site address from memory, but sometimes it’s an indicator of bot traffic.
      • Internet Service Provider - firstly, type the ISP name and secondly, type the AS number using numbers only. Do not include a prefix with AS/ASN abbreviations.
      • HTTP Header - condition does the same as the two headers above, but you could use any HTTP header here, even non-standard ones.
      • URI Path - this condition allows you to grant or deny requests that were sent to certain URLs on your site. You should omit the scheme and domain name to use it. For example, a bot is sending requests to URL https://www.example.net/some/path/resource.html, in which case you would use /some/path/resource.html for the rule. Commonly used with the Match to expression match type to cover multiple files and directories via Regular Expressions.
      • Domain - our service automatically protects the subdomains for your main domain name. But sometimes you might need to apply a Custom Rule to some specific subdomains, this is where you should use this condition.
    2. If you selected HTTP Header in the previous step, then populate the Header Name field with the name of the header that you wish to use in your trigger.
    3. In the LOGICAL CONDITION dropdown menu, choose an operator. The operator options available in this dropdown are pre-defined based upon the criterion selected in the previous step.
      Click to review the operator options
      • Is / Is not - this means a strict match
      • Contains / Not contains - a partial match to the rule string
      • Greater than / Less than - applicable to number values only
      • Is any of - a strict match to stated possible values
      • Matches the expression - matches a regular expression
    4. Type a value into the FIELD VALUE text field. This is the value for the corresonding operator selected in the previous step.
  5. Optionally, click Add condition to add another condition.
  6. If you added another condition in the previous step, repeat steps 4a-4d to add the new condition parameters. You can add multiple conditions to a rule, but note that when adding more than one condition, all conditions are treated with the logical operator AND. This means that all listed conditions must be triggered before the associated action is performed. Optionally, to remove a condition that you do not want associated with your rule, click X beside the condition to be deleted.
  7. Now choose an action that is to be triggered by your condition(s). Choose from the following actions:
    Click to review the actions available
    • Deny access - access is denied to your website.
    • Grant access - access is granted to your website.
    • Use CAPTCHA - access is granted to your website, but only after successful completion of a CAPTCHA challenge.
    • Redirect to: - regular access is denied and the traffic is redirected to either a particular page in your website, or another website page entirely. After selecting this action, you must provide the URL of the redirection target page.
    • Limit request rate by: - access requests from the same source are restricted within the bounds set in the additional fields for this action. After selecting this action, you must state how many requests that you will allow within a stated time period.
  8. Click ADD RULE to add your new rule.
  9. Enure that your new rule has been activated.
    1. At the top of the page, you should see a success banner with the text: Information: Blackwall Settings were saved. Web server configuration was applied.
    2. In the existing Custom Rules list, locate your new rule. ../../../img/rule-editor-3.png
    3. Make sure that the rule activation checkbox is checked. In the future, you can also choose to uncheck this checkbox to deactivate the rule.

Once created, rules can not be edited. If you need to change a rule, add a new rule with the new configuration desired and then remove the old rule.

Note

For FIELD VALUE entry for step 2c and the Redirect option for available actions in step 3, you can add URLs in two ways. You can:

  • Add the URL as an absolute URL including the transfer protocol; e.g. http://anywebsite.com/any-page
  • Alternatively, you can add the URL as a relative URL, so long as the URL is in the same website as the one for which you are creating a custom rule; e.g. /any-page. In effect, this is the same as using http://your-protected-website.com/any-page.
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