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My IP has also been attacked a few times. It is annoying and scary at the same time. I had to purchase a new IP and move all my websites to the new IP to avoid it. What is the point of these stupid attacks anyway. Glad to see you got it sorted.
Thanks Judy! Sorry to hear that you have faced the same situation. Fortunately, we were able to pinpoint how it was happening and patch up the server and some inefficient code that made the DDOS attack possible.
Hey Guys,
Sorry to hear about the attack – we got hit also.
Would love to hear what your findings are and your methods moving forward to stop the problem happening again. It might help us to formulate a plan ourselves.
Chris
Thanks lutand!
In our case, the attackers were able to expose an attack vector on our server using the api we have in place for recording stats and for receiving update requests to the plugin update engine. Our developers spent the majority of the day putting in place some measures to prevent DDOS attacks in the future and implemented some rate-limiting on the api endpoints for our plugin update engine. While doing this, we also noticed an inefficient query that compounded the server problems and we fixed that.
Preventing attacks in the future
I’m not sure of the attack vector used in your specific case, but the primary fix for us was that we implemented rate-limiting on the exposed api endpoints and added some ddos rule protection to protect against wp-login.php flooding.
In addition to the above, we also installed the WP Spam Shield plugin to prevent spam user registrations. On average, a new spam account was added every three minutes. Since adding the WP Spam Shield plugin, our spam user registrations have dropped substantially.
I hope this info helps. We will try to post more about the situation as soon as we can.