We have been monitoring a large-scale Layer 7 HTTPS flood attack (i.e., application level DDoS) against a customer over the past few weeks. It is being distributed across 47,000 IP addresses and has been pushing over 120,000 HTTPS requests per second (RPS) to the website. Unlike volumetric attacks that target the network link (measured in… […]
Tag Archives: ddos
Spotlight: WPBeginner’s Approach to WordPress Security
WPBeginner offers tutorials, tips, and tricks for WordPress beginners to improve their sites. With over 150K Twitter followers and almost 10 million monthly visitors, the website is undeniably popular. The high-quality content provided by WPBeginner helps WordPress users make better decisions and gain awareness of their options. Using research and thought leadership, WPBeginner offers guidance… […]
Large CCTV Botnet Leveraged in DDoS Attacks
Our security operations team investigate and mitigate multiple denial of service (DDoS) attacks every single day. One recent case caught our attention because of the intensity and duration of the attack, and – as we discovered through some research – how it was being done. In this article, we’ll share the specifics in an effort to track… […]
The Growing DDoS Threat to Website Owners
As website attacks continue to evolve, we see growing levels of sophistication in the way attackers are expanding the economics of their industry. The monetization potential of attacking websites continues to grow exponentially as more website come online (currently estimated to be over a billion live sites). With this evolution comes new tactics that we’ve… […]
Lizard Squad Ransom Threats: New Name, Same Faux Armada Collective M.O.
CloudFlare recently wrote about the group of cyber criminals claiming to be be the “Armada Collective.” In that article, we stressed that this group had not followed through on any of the ransom threats they had made. Quite simply, this copycat group of cyber criminals had not actually carried out a single DDoS attack—they were […]
Empty DDoS Threats: Meet the Armada Collective
Beginning in March 2016, we began hearing reports of a gang of cybercriminals once again calling themselves the Armada Collective. The calling card of the gang was an extortion email sent to a wide variety of online businesses threatening to launch DDoS attacks if they weren’t paid in Bitcoin. From The Wizard of Oz (1939) […]
WordPress Sites Leveraged in Layer 7 DDoS Campaigns
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 […]
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 […]
