We first disclosed that the WordPress pingback method was being misused to perform massive layer 7 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks back on March 2014. The problem, as previously described,was that any WordPress website with the pingback feature enabled (which is on by default) could be used to attack the availability of other websites. The attacks wouldRead […]
Tag Archives: ddos
The Risks of Hiring a Bad SEO Company
Today we are not going to explore malware or any other overtly malicious traffic. Instead this post is a warning about dishonest marketing tactics used by services claiming to improve your website traffic or Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We recently received a report from one our clients claiming that their website was experiencing a DistributedRead […]
Increased Popularity in DDoS Extortion Campaigns
Over the past few months, our security operations group have identified and mitigated an increasing number of DDoS attacks tied to extortion attempts from different cyber crime groups, including DD4BC, Armada Collective and a few more unnamed ones. These DDoS extortion attempts are starting to exploit smaller websites that may be less able to defendRead […]
Analyzing Popular Layer 7 Application DDoS Attacks
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have been a major concern for website owners for a while. All types of sites, from small to big, have been taken down and kept offline because of them. Even over-provisioned servers can be taken offline by the smallest of DDoS attacks; caused by IP addresses being null routed byRead […]
Common Website Security Terminology Defined
If you want to keep your website safe, it is important to understand the terminology used to describe the causes and effects of hacks. Software vulnerabilities and access control issues are two of the main causes of website infections, and in this post we will define some of the terminology used to describe them. WeRead […]
DDoS from China – Facebook, WordPress and Twitter Users Receiving Sucuri Error Pages
Over the past few weeks, our Security Operation Center (SOC) has been seeing some different, and very suspicious requests to some of our servers. At first we thought it was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, mainly due to the high concentration of requests (thousands per second). Looking further however, it actually seemed like […]
Anatomy of 2,000 Compromised Web Servers used in DDoS Attack
One of our clients was being attacked by a layer-7 DDoS attack for more than a week. The attack was generating around 5,000 HTTP requests per second, which took his site and server down. It also caused his hosting company to suspend his server for “ToS violation”. Yes, some hosting companies consider a ToS violation […]
Quick Analysis of a DDoS Attack Using SSDP
Last week, one of our many clients came under an interesting attack. Enough that it was flagged for human intervention. The interesting aspect of the case was that it was a multi-faceted DDoS attack. The first issue we noticed was a Layer 7 – HTTP Flood (DDoS) Attack attack generating thousands of HTTP requests per […]
Case Study: Analyzing the Origins of a DDoS Attack
Recently a client was experiencing a massive layer 7 DDOS attack, generating tens of thousands of random HTTP requests per second to the server. The architecture of the website included a cluster of three web servers responsible for handling all incoming traffic, which did little to alleviate the pressures brought about the attack. An interesting […]
Understanding Denial of Service and Brute Force Attacks – WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, vBulletin
Many are likely getting emails with the following subject header Large Distributed Brute Force WordPress Attack Underway – 40,000 Attacks Per Minute. Just this week we put out a post titled More Than 162,000 WordPress Sites Used for Distributed Denial of Service Attack. What’s the Big Deal? Remember life before social media? How quiet and […]
