Tag Archives: ddos

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 […]

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 […]

More Than 162,000 WordPress Sites Used for Distributed Denial of Service Attack

Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks are becoming a common trend on our blog lately, and that’s OK because it’s a very serious issue for every website owner. Today I want to talk about a large DDOS attack that leveraged thousands of unsuspecting WordPress websites as indirect amplification vectors. Any WordPress site with XML-RPC enabled […]

Layer 7 DDOS – Blocking HTTP Flood Attacks

There are many types of Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks that can affect and bring down a website, and they vary in complexity and size. The most well known attacks are the good old syn-flood, followed by the Layer 3/4 UDP and DNS amplification attacks. Today though, we’re going to spend a little time […]

DDoS Prevention: Protecting The Origin

One of the many great features that CloudFlare provides is protection from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. A malicious party who wants to make your website or web service unavailable could try to overwhelm it with requests from compromised machines (or bots) all around the world. With a large enough volume of requests, your […]

The DDoS That Almost Broke the Internet

The New York Times this morning published a story about the Spamhaus DDoS attack and how CloudFlare helped mitigate it and keep the site online. The Times calls the attack the largest known DDoS attack ever on the Internet. We wrote about the attack last week. At the time, it was a large attack, sending […]