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
-
Advise / Help on Bad Link Removals
Hey everyone.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheITOteam
Im new to the community and new to backlinks - hence the question to the community today.
I would like help understanding options and work load around back links and removing them.
I have a client with over 8000 back links as a few years ago he paid someone about £10 to boost his rankings by adding thousands of backlinks.
We fear this is having a bad effect on their site and rankings organically as 90% of these back links have a spam score of over 50% and also no follows. My questions to the community (if you could be so kind to share) are:
1. Whats the best way to decide if a Backlink is worth keeping or removing
2. Is there a tool to decide this or assist with this somewhere on the internet? Ive had advise stating if its not hurting the page we should keep it. However, again...
How do I know what damage each Backlink is causing to the domain? I appriciate anyones time to offer some advice to a novice looking to clear these1 -
HELP!! We are losing search visibility fast and I don't know why?
We have recently moved from http to https - could this be a problem? https://www.thepresentfinder.co.uk As far as I'm aware we are doing everything by SEO best practice and have no manual penalties, all content is unique and we are not doing any link farming etc...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | The-Present-Finder0 -
Help identifying cause for total rank loss
Hello, Last week I noticed one of my pages decreased in rank for a particular query from #8 to #13. Although I had recently made a few minor edits to the page (added an introductory paragraph and left-column promo to increase word count), I thought the reason for the decrease was due to a few newly ranked pages that I hadn't seen before. In an attempt to regain my original position, I tried to optimize the meta title for the singular form of the word. After making this change, I fetched and rendered the page as Google (status = partial) and submitted the page for indexing (URL only, not including on-page links). Almost immediately after submitting, the page dropped from #13 out of the top 50. I've since changed the meta title back to what it was originally and let Google crawl and index the page on its own, but the page is still not in the top 50. Could the addition of the page description and left column promos tipped the scales of keyword stuffing? If I change everything back to the way it was originally, is it reasonable to think I should regain my original position below the new pages? Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
Strange client request
I have a client who attends an internet marketing meetup. I have been once myself. Good group of people but most seem lost when it comes to SEO and can't tell Black from White! Well today my client emailed me and in the email she mentioned doing a trick to the title tags. Client: "there is a trick to use with the title by putting keywords in quotes and parenthasis. I'm sure you know how to do that little trick. If we do it in the title and in the first few lines of the verbage it will soar us near the top and hopefully on the first page of Google." a few sentences later "We could use a tad more content on the first page ( with parantesis and quotes) to boost us up in the ratings. At least it is an easy trick to do." I have never heard of this. Has anyone else heard about this. Please share thoughts. It sounds completely bogus to me but I will be the first to admit that i don't know everything! However i would like to have more than just my opinion when I talk to my client. Let me know what you think.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NateStewart0 -
Please Help- Confusion about how to Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization and Keyword Stuffing
I am pretty much a rookie when it comes to the SEO game and to be completely honest SEO is really confusing. I just recently started using MOZ and I was looking at my On-Page report and I saw that I needed to correct some “Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization” errors. So I looked at the error and the fix. Here is what MOZ gave me. Cannibalizing link "How to make a fake diploma", "How to get a fake diploma", "Making a Fake High School Diploma", "Fake Diploma Template", and "Framing your fake diploma" Explanation It's a best practice in SEO to target each keyword with a single page on your site (sometimes two if you've already achieved high rankings and are seeking a second, indented listing). To prevent engines from potentially seeing a signal that this page is not the intended ranking target and creating additional competition for your page, we suggest staying away from linking internally to another page with the target keyword(s) as the exact anchor text. Note that using modified versions is sometimes fine (for example, if this page targeted the word 'elephants', using 'baby elephants' in anchor text would be just fine). Recommendation Unless there is intent to rank multiple pages for the target keyword, it may be wise to modify the anchor text of this link so it is not an exact match. This error is for my Hompage(http://www.fake-diploma.com) for the keyword Fake Diploma. My understanding is that for Self-Cannibalization to occur I would have to have a link on this page pointing to another page using "Fake Diploma" as my anchor text since I want this page to rank for Fake Diploma. I do have the right hand sidebar which contains my most recent posts and some of my titles do include Fake Diploma. How to make a Fake Diploma
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diplomajim
Fake Diploma Template
Framing your Fake Diploma
To me theses are separate longtail keywords. While they do include Fake Diploma in them I thought theses were fine because they are not an Exact Match to each other nor are they an Exact Match to “Fake Diploma”. Am I wrong about this? Secondly I reached out on another Forum trying to get a better understanding of this and just got even more confused. I was told that I am also Keyword Stuffing and could be penalized. They said because I have Fake Diploma in most of my article titles that I am Stuffing Fake Diploma. I am in a Niche Market and of course most of my titles include Fake Diploma because that is what my entire site is about. I used the Google Keyword Tool and searched Fake Diploma and it gave me a list of about 79 related keywords like: Make a Fake Diploma Online
Create a Fake Diploma
Fake Diploma Software This is just a few of the many that I have. I thought the best way to rank for a keyword was to actually write a post about that Keyword and use it as the title of the article. I am not over using the Keyword in the actual article and I maybe have a Keyword density of about 2-5%. I thought Keyword Stuffing was where you actually used the Keyword like 50 times and also just added random Keywords to the article that did not belong. Please help me with any insights you can offer. I feel like I am doing all of this completely wrong.0 -
Google Disavow and Penalty lifted please help?
We disavowed 80% of our backlink profile due to our last SEO building cheap nasty links and filed a reconsideration requested (we had the Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.xxx.co.uk penalty for a year from the 24<sup>th</sup> march 2012 but thought it best to clean up before round 2 – even though we had no real penalty and we dd some decent link building that moved us up). We then received a successful penalty lifted note (on the 22<sup>nd</sup> of May 2013) but our rankings dropped (due to the crap links propping us up) since then we have built a fair few high quality links but our rankings do not seem to be moving much if at all (7 weeks clear now). has anyone had any experience with the above (are we in a sandbox type situation). Thank you for your time Thanks Bob
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
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 -
Article submission, and how to build backlinks for Ecommerce? [HELP]
Hi guys, I have a question, for high quality backlinks apparently you go to these article websites where you submit your site such as Ezine etc etc, however is it just one article you submit to these as it'll look like duplicate content? Also can I have it on my site first? How does it work? Also I run an ecommerce website, how can I build backlinks to each product, theres over 200+ products and 1.6k subcategories. I would like to rank for as many as possible but getting an SEO company to do this would cost to much. Any ideas on how I should go about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | InkCartridgesFast1