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 […]
Tag Archives: ddos
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 […]
Good Web Security News: Open DNS Resolvers Are Getting Closed
This has been a rough week in the security industry with big attacks and compromises reported at companies from Facebook to Apple. We’re therefore happy to end the week with some good news: the web’s open resolvers, one of the sources of the biggest DDoS attacks, are getting closed. Sad State of Affairs Last October, […]