What is Whitelisting?

Whitelisting is a cybersecurity strategy that involves explicitly allowing only approved entities (e.g., applications, IP addresses, users, websites) to access a system or network, while denying all others by default. It is commonly used to prevent malware, unauthorized access, and other security threats by creating a 'whitelist' of trusted items and blocking anything not on that list. This approach is the opposite of blacklisting, which allows everything except explicitly blocked items.