DDoS attack
A terrible day for a client today and a dangerous day for our whole server system and data centre
DDoS has been around for a long time. Here is a very good article you might like to read. https://blog.sucuri.net/2016/02/wordpress-sites-leveraged-in-ddos-campaigns.html
Basically, this morning, all of our sites on one server started going slow, then going offline, not being found or available (due to length of time to connect) Called the data centre and the Techs jumped on it. One website we host was the problem, and it wasn’t their fault. They were being attacked by infected sites around the entire world, almost every country you could think of, with a pingback request. Tens of thousands requests for ping backs every minute. 106% server load, and almost a melt down. The decision was made to turn the site off to thwart the attack before the entire server collapsed and all sites on it failed completely. Investigations continued through the day, and thanks to wordpress, and wordfence and the data centre and our staff, the culprit and modus operandi was identified in Moscow, Russia. The client they attacked, just happened to have a global launch of their latest media offering last night. A coincidence ? Maybe, but they did travel through Russia to make this film. We worked on it, and came up with a solution. With all the orders coming through from their payment gateway via other websites, this client could not access his sites backend (as we suspended it to save the server) and was very, very upset, naturally. A solution to nullify the attack, and make the site and domain live again (backend and emails only) with an apology page up for real visitors was implemented and this non system page nullified the strain on the server, whilst explaining the situation to potential purchasers. This allowed the client to continue to service his sales today from the sales platforms and respond and send out confirmations. If you think this cannot happen to you, think again. Cyber Crime is out there, and its a matter of the tools that you have, the site and hosting that you have, and the backup you have to see you survive and then resume normal business. To all the lovely people who are part of our support team who assisted today, THANK YOU. If you ever need to ensure you can survive this, give us a call, there is a plan that we proved today…