WordPress Search Based DOS Attack

[Hikari]

Hello

http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2010/01/01/wordpress-search-based-dos-attack/

If any of our WP sites receive this attack, will it be safe inside HawkHost?

[Tony]

Safe in what way exactly? We cannot just sort of out of the blue know it's happening because we'd start filtering legitimate traffic. This sounds like a GET flood of sort if it's one IP easy to stop multiple IP's more difficult have to parse the access logs for a list of IP's doing it.

So to answer the question you're not safe in respect to us doing it pro actively all the time. The attack has to start for us to do anything.

[Hikari]

I don't know exactally what the host should do against a DOS.

So to talk more generally, if somebody starts a DOS attack against a site, do you have any means of blocking it, or the only solution would be return a 503 response or something like that and wait the attack to fade?

[Tony]

DOS attacks which are trying to flood out the web server connections our system will start filtering. This type of attack more sounds like they're trying to use up all the CPU by doing all kinds of searches which are different url's.

So we'd see lots of usage coming from your site check the traffic see if we can do anything if it's from a few IP's or there is a specific pattern. If it's all over the place then we might just disable access to the site.

Though with this type of attack I think you could mitigate it yourself as well by simply denying the IP's doing it. If they're not hitting the PHP pages anymore they're not causing any trouble.