HELP! My client got a DDOS Attack! Need advice
-
Here the setup:
-
Server is hosted inhouse. It got attacked using a DDOS from 20+ IP addresses spoofing in different counries. Our server overloaded and didn't work anymore.
-
URL is registered at GoDaddy.
-
Signed up at Dreamhost. We pointed DNS to Dreamhost successfully.
-
Attacks kept coming and messed up other sites on the Dreamhost shared server. We didn't know we were being followed at first. We originally thought they were attacking the IP address on our inhouse server.
-
Dreamhost noticed the attack and put us on a seperate IP and disabled our URL until the attacks 'stopped'.
MY QUESTION IS:
What do I do if they don't stop? Close shop? 99% of the business is internet driven. This has to be the blackest Blackhat SEO ever.
-
-
Thanks for sharing GKLA, Very useful information . Thanks you all!
-
Take a look at this option: http://www.cloudflare.com/features-security
-
These IP were spoofing from many countries. They would disappear in minutes. Anyway, we found the main IPs that were attacking. YES YOU ARE RIGHT about identifying the one common factor. At 1st we thought blocking IPs would work, but when that didn't work, we started blocking the 'sytle' they were using.
-
It looks like you got this resolved. We went through something similar many years ago but we were lucky because our website is for the US only. The attack was coming in from China, Russia and several other European countries.
We simply blocked all countries except the US, Mexico and Canada in our Firewall.
You just need to identify the one common factor in the attack and filter that out through your firewall.
-
Update:
Switched to Amazon Cloud and got Amazon involved. They helped out by providing some tools. Basically we filtered the attacks by not accepting IPs who were transferring a certain amount of packets. Woot Woot! We have been up and running now for about 6 days with no problem. All I know is that the attacker had a browser with a Russian Language. The site Ship Car Overseas survived!
-
Update:
We dropped Dreamhost.com since they couldn't help. They were useless in this area.
We copied the DB and pointed the URL in GoDaddy to our new host at Amazon Cloud. Well, the DDoS attacks a still coming in. The site was up for a short while (I'm talking minutes) then refreshed the pages and the ISP says the site wasn't there anymore. Damn, this attacker is relentless. I will be enabling the Amazon Balance Loader tomorrow. If this renders the DDoS attack ineffective, then Amazon solves it. But I won't find out until tomorrow.
-
Here is what dreamhost said:
" it does indeed look like you were getting attacked yet again. Unfortunately there isn't much you or myself can do in these cases.. I've disabled your domain again and will re-enable it in a week. I'm hoping that by then, the attacker has given up and moved on. If this is not the case, I regret to say that you will need to find hosting elsewhere as we do not offer a DDoS protection service. Please let me know if you have any questions.Thanks! Jason Y "
In conclusion dreamhost can't help.
-
Thanks there cowboy. Dreamhost still has not replied. I think I'll keep everything tracked here just in case other people run into this DDOS problem in the future. So far this is what has happened:
- Dreamhost disabled our URL and we are still waiting for their response.
- I took the Database and transfered all files to a new domain.
- Launching a massive Adwords Campaign to make up for the loss of 3 days revenue.
The reason I decided to transfer the DB to a new domain was I don't want to be a sitting duck if Dreamhost says they can't help. I am pretty sure they can help, but I put into place my plan B just in case. I'll keep everyone posted.
-
Hey again Francisco, upon rereading your question, it looks like I went off half cocked when I answered it. I missed that you had solved the immediate problem and that you were wondering what course of action to takke if they don't stop. the attack
If someone continues deliberately attacking your site I'm thinking the only course of action is to change your domain name. It's not a good solution so I hope someone else chimes in with a better one.
-
Hello Francisco: Really sorry to hear bout this. Bummer!
I've never personally experienced a DDOS attack ,so I called the web host I use to get his advice. He said that Dreamhost should be able to offer some kind of DDOS mitigation service.He seemed surprised that they weren't able to block it if it was coming in from only 20+ IP addresses.
He also said that if the attack continued, they'd probably not want the account after a certain point. He seemed surprised that they weren't able to block it if it was coming in from only 20+ IP addresses.
One of the main reasons I use him is that he's always been helpful when I've had problems. He said that he'd be willing to host you for a month to see if he could help. His company name is TRK hosting
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My rankings are not stable. Do I need to be worry about it
Hi, My client has an ecommerce website. He is ranking on top for many strong keywords. However with two prime keywords he is unstable. My client's business is in UK. Hence we are checking in Google UK. We are noticing that from 4rth Dec that our single keyword is unstable and home page at times ranks in top 10 and at times out of the picture. Please help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Devtechexpert0 -
1st Ecommerce site got penalized, can we start a 2nd one?
Hello, A client's first site got penalized by Goolge Penguin. It has recovered through cleaning up backlinks, but not to where it was before. It is 2nd and 3rd for several money keywords, but is far less successful than before penalization. We are starting a second site. Here's the important steps to mention The new site shows up first for it's domain name, and it has 30 pages indexed. It shows up NOWHERE for our leading search term. Out other site has a blog post that is 3rd for that search term. We are using new categories and new organization. We are using a different cart solution We are adding all unique content The home pages and some of the product pages are very thorough. We are adding comprehensive products like nothing else in the industry (10X) We plan on adding a very comprehensive blog, but haven't started yet. We've added the top 100 products so far. Our other store has 500. There's a lot of spam in the industry, so sites are slow to rank. Our category descriptions are 500 words Again, all unique content. No major errors in Moz Campaign tools Just a few categories so far, we're going to add many more. Same Google Analytics account as our other site It looks like we should eventually be on page 3 for our major search term. Again, we're nowhere for anything right now. ... Have you seen that Google will not rank a second site because it's from the same company and Google Analytics account, or does Google let you rank 2 sites in the same industry? We are hoping it's just slow to rank. If you can rank 2 sites, what are your best recommendations to help show up? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
By changing the wordpress theme what need to take for seo consideration?
Hi guys! we have a site that been using a theme for a year now and we decided to change to a new one, the question here is, does it affect seo? or it is possible to remain 100% for the seo? What caution tips that you guys can share for changing the theme? Does just remaining the same URL works?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andrewwatson922 -
What is your SEO agency doing in terms of link building for clients?
What are you or your SEO agency doing for your client's link building efforts? What are you (or the agency) doing yourself, or out-sourcing, or having the client do for link building? If a new client needs some serious link building done, what do you prescribe and implement straight off the bat? What are your go-to link building tactics for clients? What are the link building challenges faced by your agency in 2013/2014? What's working for your agency and what's not? Does your agency work closely with the client's marketing department to gain link traction? If so, what are collaborating on? What else might you be willing to share about your agencies link building practices? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Being Link Attacked - Should I worry?
Hey, Hope everyone is well. Just a quick question. I hope to get an answer from Google officially (I've asked in their webmaster forums area) but any experience or opinions from the community here would be great. I noticed recently that our site started to get thousands of links from comments in random blogs from all across the web. This is nothing to do with us as we don't "build links". I can only assume it is a competitor trying to get our site hit by the algorithm for a particular search term, as all the anchor text (I estimate about 1,800 links with this anchor text) point to one page on our site that is ranking for that term. I recently removed the website from webmaster tools and re added, due to an unrelated issue about the a video rich snippet not updating, and all the links have just popped up today on there. Is this something I need to worry about? and should I start collecting all these domains and using the disavow tool to block the whole domain of these sites with the comments (some of them seem like genuine sites). There seem to be new ones everyday and it looks to be an ongoing attack as well. Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JonathanRolande0 -
Advice on links after Penguin hit
Firstly we have no warnings or messages in WMT. We have racked up thousands of anchor text urls. Our fault, we didnt nofollow and also some of our many cms sites replicated the links sitewide to the tune of 20,000 links. I`m in the process of removing the code which causes this problem in most of the culprit sites but how long will it take roughly for a crawl to recalculate the links? In my WMT it still shows the links increasing but I think this is retrospective data. However, after this crawl we should see a more relevant link count. We also provide some web software which has been used by many sites. Google may consider our followed anchor text violating spam rules. So I ask, if we were to change the link text to our url only and add nofollow, will this improve the spam issue? We could have as many as 4,000 links per website, as it is a calendar function and list all dates into the future.......and we would like to retain a link to our website of course for marketing purposes. What we dont want is sitewide link spam again. Some of our other links are low quality, some are okay. However, we have lost rankings, probably due to low quality links and overuse of anchor text.. Is this the case the Google has just devalued the links algorythmically or is there an actual penalty to make the rankings drop? As we have no warnings in WMT, I feel there isnt the need to remove the lower quality links and in most cases we havent control over the link placements. We should just rectify that we have a better future linking profile? If we have to remove spam links, then that can only be a good reason to cause negative seo?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xtopher660 -
Banner Ads help seo?
I see in OSE banner ads counting ads as incoming links - My question is has anyone done a study showing a non tagged banner ad link and its effects on seo? Does google counting it as organic since it has no tagging or since its in a ad spot its ignored?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
My attempt to reduce duplicate content got me slapped with a doorway page penalty. Halp!
On Friday, 4/29, we noticed that we suddenly lost all rankings for all of our keywords, including searches like "bbq guys". This indicated to us that we are being penalized for something. We immediately went through the list of things that changed, and the most obvious is that we were migrating domains. On Thursday, we turned off one of our older sites, http://www.thegrillstoreandmore.com/, and 301 redirected each page on it to the same page on bbqguys.com. Our intent was to eliminate duplicate content issues. When we realized that something bad was happening, we immediately turned off the redirects and put thegrillstoreandmore.com back online. This did not unpenalize bbqguys. We've been looking for things for two days, and have not been able to find what we did wrong, at least not until tonight. I just logged back in to webmaster tools to do some more digging, and I saw that I had a new message. "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected doorway pages on http://www.bbqguys.com/" It is my understanding that doorway pages are pages jammed with keywords and links and devoid of any real content. We don't do those pages. The message does link me to Google's definition of doorway pages, but it does not give me a list of pages on my site that it does not like. If I could even see one or two pages, I could probably figure out what I am doing wrong. I find this most shocking since we go out of our way to try not to do anything spammy or sneaky. Since we try hard not to do anything that is even grey hat, I have no idea what could possibly have triggered this message and the penalty. Does anyone know how to go about figuring out what pages specifically are causing the problem so I can change them or take them down? We are slowly canonical-izing urls and changing the way different parts of the sites build links to make them all the same, and I am aware that these things need work. We were in the process of discontinuing some sites and 301 redirecting pages to a more centralized location to try to stop duplicate content. The day after we instituted the 301 redirects, the site we were redirecting all of the traffic to (the main site) got blacklisted. Because of this, we immediately took down the 301 redirects. Since the webmaster tools notifications are different (ie: too many urls is a notice level message and doorway pages is a separate alert level message), and the too many urls has been triggering for a while now, I am guessing that the doorway pages problem has nothing to do with url structure. According to the help files, doorway pages is a content problem with a specific page. The architecture suggestions are helpful and they reassure us they we should be working on them, but they don't help me solve my immediate problem. I would really be thankful for any help we could get identifying the pages that Google thinks are "doorway pages", since this is what I am getting immediately and severely penalized for. I want to stop doing whatever it is I am doing wrong, I just don't know what it is! Thanks for any help identifying the problem! It feels like we got penalized for trying to do what we think Google wants. If we could figure out what a "doorway page" is, and how our 301 redirects triggered Googlebot into saying we have them, we could more appropriately reduce duplicate content. As it stands now, we are not sure what we did wrong. We know we have duplicate content issues, but we also thought we were following webmaster guidelines on how to reduce the problem and we got nailed almost immediately when we instituted the 301 redirects.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CoreyTisdale0