Milica Kostic 4 years ago
WordPress DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service attacks) are an unfortunate commonplace weapon in the cybercriminal’s arsenal. They can quickly take your website out of commission if you don’t have the right security precautions in place.
And just hoping that your site won’t fall victim to a strike won’t do you much good. In fact, WordPress is by far the most targeted by hackers, with 90 percent of its users requesting malware cleanups.
With that in mind, what steps can you take to ensure your website repels WordPress DDoS attacks effectively?
We will answer that here, but let’s first define what a DDoS attack actually is.
A DDoS attack essentially blocks you off from your network resources. It does so by swarming your website with enormous amounts of traffic coming from many different computers. This spike in requests slows the site down to a crawl.
Hackers control a botnet, a network of malware-infected computers, to accomplish this. The size of a botnet varies wildly, but they can grow to gigantic sizes: Mirai, for example, terrorized IoT devices with the help of well over a hundred thousand infected computers.
Now that you’re up to speed on DDoS, we can discuss the steps you can take to keep your WordPress safe from such potential threats.
A content delivery network is a network of servers distributed across the world. It reflects web content from the origin server to one of these servers and then delivers it to the end-user.
The network stores a copied or cached version of your website’s page elements (images, videos, HTML, and more). Once someone clicks on a page, the CDN receives and responds to that request, rather than the origin server.
A CDN, by that token, represents a good defense against DDoS strikes. It distributes all of that incoming traffic across a multitude of servers, effectively stopping it in its tracks. Rather than having it hit your website full-on, it splashes its botnet force before it has a chance of reaching the main server.
Recommendations: MaxCDN, Cloudflare, StackPath, and Rackspace provide excellent CDN services, so you can’t go wrong with them.
An intrusion prevention system monitors traffic and looks for unusual behavior that points to a hacking attempt. Whenever it spots any, it blocks the IP sending it and notifies you about it. It’s basically an upgraded version of an intrusion detection system, which simply alerts you of strange activities, rather than automatically removing the threat.
Having an IPS solution can spare you a lot of trouble, especially since it does its job independently. However, it doesn’t always do the job perfectly.
An IPS works by comparing traffic to already existing databases of signs that point to an attack.</strong> While that does fend off conventional DDoS strikes that have recognizable signatures, new ones are a different matter. The so-called zero-day DDoS strikes exploit new security vulnerabilities, and an IPS can’t detect them. Nevertheless, an IPS will ward off the majority of DDoS attempts, especially the ones with known tells.
Recommendations: you can take a look at Snort, Suricata, Sagan, and Security Onion for quality solutions.
The quality of your web hosting provider plays a major role in your website’s capability to cope with intense traffic. You’ll have some hosts whose servers are too sensitive and slow down with just a minor boost in requests.
Of course, a server that buckles so easily won’t stand a chance against a concentrated DDoS effort. That’s why you should always have a provider that boasts great protection against traffic flooding.
Fortunately, such providers are everywhere. Most of the well-known, respected hosts have competent firewalls that keep your website safe. WP Engine is a fine example, but it’s far from the only option out there for you.
Flexibility is one of WordPress’s hallmark attributes, but it’s also a security liability. Some API’s, which connect with third-party plugins, are susceptible to DDoS attacks since a surge of calls to an application can shut said app down easily.
It’s fortunate, then, that WordPress lets you disable particularly risky API’s. For example, many people choose to disable XML RPC, which essentially facilitates the use of the WordPress app on mobile devices. Alternatively, you could consider shutting down JSON REST API, the one that lets plugins access and manage WP data.
There are pretty simple options for disabling these API’s in the form of plugins. You can also do it manually, however, by changing the code yourself. You should also know that doing either won’t protect you from an attack that leverages HTTP requests.
Web application firewalls work great with IPS’s. While the IPS spots attack signatures, the WAF inspects the logic of a request in a way that IPS can’t. In other words, the former excels at quantity, while the latter excels at quality.
A WAF usually guards a website or application by catching a request and filtering it before passing it on to the website. Furthermore, a WAF works like a charm for detecting other kinds of attacks, such as SQL injections.
It’s worth noting that an app-level WAF isn’t as effective as one that “covers” the website in its entirety. This is because it shields the app alone, which doesn’t stop a DDoS attack from seeping into your site. Rather, it just protects the app in question.
Recommendations: There are tons of smart choices for WAP services to deal with DDos attacks, so any of the following will do: Sucuri, Wordfence, MalCare, Cloudflare, StackPath, NinjaFirewall.
There are a variety of WordPress security plugins that you can use to shore up your site’s defenses. We’ve already mentioned some of them, but here are a few more:
These plugins work by doing things like adding extra security layers, fixing vulnerabilities, and monitoring your site for attacks. They’re an easy way to beef up your security without having to do a lot of manual work.
WordPress is a complex platform with lots of moving parts. It’s always updating and changing, which is why you need a team of experts who can help you keep your site safe.
That’s where a 24/7 WordPress maintenance service comes in. We stay on top of all the latest security threats and update our protection measures accordingly. In addition, we routinely check your site for any vulnerabilities that may have cropped up.
If you want the peace of mind that comes with knowing your website is always safe, then you need a team like ours in your corner.
WordPress DDoS attacks can be as destructive as they can be sudden, so it’s best to be ready for it. Using CDN’s, IPS’s, WAP’s, disabling certain API’s, and choosing the best host for you goes a long way to do exactly that. With these steps, your WordPress website will stand strong in the face of a DDoS threat.
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