Did you know that in only a few minutes, a DDoS attack will pull your website down? Hackers are attacking your platform and overloading your network and your computer. Your WordPress website becomes unavailable, unresponsive, and may even go entirely offline. We’ll teach you how DDoS attacks can be avoided.
As a result, as you lose guests and clients, your industry grinds to a stop and your sales takes a dive.
Recovering from a DDoS attack will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for small companies. This recovery bill will skyrocket into millions of dollars for bigger firms.
It’s invaluable to your company to be prepared for such an attack. And, thankfully, there are ways you can protect your website from DDoS attacks and avoid them.
We’ll clarify how DDoS attacks operate in this article and we’ll show you how to prevent these attacks from happening on your site.
TL;DR- Hackers send massive volumes of traffic to your website in DDoS attacks to overload your server. This forces you to close down the account. You need a robust firewall to block malicious traffic to prevent this from occurring. On your WordPress account, instal the MalCare protection plugin. Through deploying an active firewall automatically and tracking the traffic to your site, it will help reduce the risks of DDoS attacks.
What is a DDoS Attack?
Imagine that you’re taking all the security precautions you can take on your website and now you’re satisfied that it can not be broken by a hacker. But notwithstanding that, hackers will pull down your website and cause your company harm.
They do this on your website by initiating DDoS attacks. Even after taking ample protective precautions, it is frustrating as it can happen and it brings disastrous consequences.
Described as a Distributed Denial of Service attack, DDoS is a non-intrusive attack that suggests that in order to run the attack, the hacker would not require access to the site. After ever getting into the web, they execute the hack remotely.
Instead, to interrupt its functioning, they congest the website’s server. Visitors will most certainly not be able to reach the web, and a sluggish and unresponsive site will meet the few who are able to.
Why are DDoS attacks launched by hackers? There are several explanations. Hackers usually attempt to break passwords in order to obtain access to the website. They begin a sequence of requests on your home page to test alternative username and password combinations. You will flood the platform with these requests.
To bring down major brands and ruin their company, bigger DDoS attacks are launched. To claim a ransom, hackers also use DDoS attacks. The hacker stops the DDoS attack until the website owner pays the price.
How Does A DDoS Attack Work?
To explain how a DDoS attack operates, when a guest tries to access a page, we first need to understand how the website performs. There is a procedure we’ve detailed below that takes place.
Their browser (such as Google Chrome) sends a message to your website’s registry anytime a visitor comes to your website.
The server handles the request by fetching the appropriate information and sending it back to the browser. The browser then uses this data to show to the user the content of your website.
In order to run your website, each server only has a small number of money. Depending on your hosting contract, this cap is normally supported by your web hosting company.
Now, each visitor request uses a certain amount of resources from the server. It can manage only a certain amount of browser requests at a time, since the server resources are limited. The server will be burdened with too many demands and drain its resources.
This will trigger your website to become unresponsive and sluggish. Your website will crash and go offline if the demand on the server is too high.
We will clarify how a DDoS attack operates now that you have an idea of how browsers and source servers interact.
How Does A DDoS Attack Take Place?
Hackers schedule DDoS assaults long ahead of time. It’s what you can think of as hackers planning an army to attack your site.
They create a network of devices
They usually break into and infect computers and cell phones with malware. (There were also cases where CCTVs and DVR cameras were used by DDoS attackers to initiate DDoS attacks on sites.)
Later, the malware would allow them to send requests to the targeted website from the infected computer. And this computer network is called a botnet (their army). Hackers are also willing to bypass this step and employ a botnet on the dark web that is readily accessible.
They launch thousands of ‘fake’ requests
On each computer on the botnet, they use the malware to order the computers to send requests to the web server.
They flood your server with more requests than it can handle
A certain number of resources is depleted with any submission. Your services get depleted as more and more demands come in. It causes it to fail, and the website, in essence, goes down.
In the event that a hacker is not able to launch a successful flood attack and take your site offline, the attack will affect your site’s speed and performance considerably. Visitors will be unable to view or navigate your site.When your site is under a DDoS attack, you need to act fast. The longer your site is down, the more you stand to lose in terms of customers and revenue.
How to Detect a DDoS Attack on Your WordPress Site?
What makes DDoS attacks so challenging is that no alerts are available. A hacker is able to monitor volumetric attacks on your web at any moment. Since most owners of WordPress pages do not actively search their own sites, it is impossible to see if the site is under threat.
In certain instances, until clients or guests begin to argue that they can not access the web, site owners are oblivious. Only then should you know that your platform has something wrong with it. Initially, you might believe something is wrong with your server or your web host. You might check to see if a problem is triggered by a plugin or theme.
By the time you know it’s a DDoS threat, it could be many precious hours. This indicates many hours of rest and the lack of further tourists and income.
Spotting the signals early is the safest way to prevent a DDoS attack. You should watch out for several signs that suggest it’s a DDoS attack:
Check your site’s traffic
In a DDoS attack, hackers give your website thousands of requests. This means a sudden rise in traffic will arise.
You can monitor the traffic on your website using Google Analytics. Typically, it does not represent real-time data, but you can turn this setting on.
- Sign in to Google Analytics.
- Navigate to your view.
- Open Reports.
- Click Real-Time.
Alternatively, you can also use a website security plugin like MalCare to check the traffic requests coming into your website. Install the plugin on your site, access the dashboard, and go to Security > Traffic requests.
This can be reflective of DDoS if you see that a lot of requests are coming in within a period of few requests, particularly if your website does not normally get too much valid traffic.
Check your website’s data usage
A DDoS attack’s main aim is to drain the resources of your website. You should verify how many of the tools on your website are being used.
The majority of hosting companies screen the statistics of your website on your dashboard. Visit and go to ‘Manage hosting’ in your hosting account. You want to see the consumption figures here.
Your website usually won’t quickly waste its energy. It will take a lot of traffic to hit the limits of your site.
It’s mainly symbolic of a DDoS attack if you see that the CPU utilisation and bandwidth has hit its limits.
When you know you’re under threat, in order to stop it, you need to act quickly.
How to Stop a DDoS Attack?
Your server is attacked by a DDoS attack, so normal safety precautions on your WordPress site won’t work. Many WordPress How to Avoid DDoS Attacks guides can tell you to use a web firewall programme (WAF). Not all firewalls can, however, assist in this case. Let us clarify why.
Use a firewall to stop DDoS attacks?
On your WordPress account, you could instal a firewall plugin that tracks your traffic and blocks any malicious traffic and bad bots. On the WordPress account, most of these firewalls work well, but they have their limitations. This is because a firewall has to catch two kinds of requests here:
- Solicitations that use WordPress. For example, once a user visits example.com, a request is sent to your server for your site to be loaded. This kind of request uses the installation of the WordPress.
- Requests to the web that do not need to be loaded with WordPress. Hackers have forms to submit requests in this manner, such as example.com/readme.txt. WordPress doesn’t need the appeal.
You need a firewall which can catch requests of all kinds. But most firewalls for apps only run on WordPress and can only capture the first kind of request. In DDoS attacks, such plugins are ineffectual.
Our MalCare plugin will shortly announce a new in-built firewall that will catch requests of all kinds. Before it hits your site, it can detect malicious traffic and block it. In DDoS reduction, this will help.
Whichever plugin you want to use, make sure it can block all forms of DDos attacks or your website requests.
Extra Measures to Stop DDoS Attacks?
Here are a few more steps you can take to avoid a DDoS threat, apart from the firewall:
- To support you, email your host and confirm what actions they should take. They will most certainly temporarily wipe down your website. That’s going to help stop the assault. Preventive steps such as installing a firewall should then be taken before you make your website live again.
- To help you prevent the threat, enforce DDoS security measures, and save your site, recruit competent security services.
- In certain cases, to try and break into your website, hackers can use DDoS as a distraction. On your WordPress account, mount a WordPress ransomware scanner immediately and verify that your site has been hacked and corrupted with malware.
If anything fails, you will have to survive the hurricane. DDoS attacks don’t last forever. The attack will finally cease. For major corporations and eCommerce platforms, this could not be an option as the financial risks and repair costs would be too great. For a blogger whose life relies on ad sales, it may even be tragic.
Battling a DDoS attack is difficult, but you can rebound from it with the proper steps. The only way to counter a DDoS attack, however, is to avoid it!
How to Prevent a DDoS Attack?
Protecting your website is faster and much cheaper than avoiding a DDoS attack and recuperating from it. Unfortunately, you will not take any silver-bullet precaution that will stop a DDoS strike.
You can, however, enforce some steps of site protection that will help you block a DDoS threat. But note, most of these are not set-and-forget steps. To track your site’s operation and review your traffic periodically to detect a DDoS threat, you need to use these controls.
That said, in order to defend your site against a DDoS attack, you need to:
- Installing a firewall
- Maintain an activity log
- Implement geoblocking
- Install a malware security scanner
These steps may be applied manually, requiring technical knowledge or by using multiple plugins. However, all these steps under one roof are protected by our MalCare protection plugin. The plugin is simple to use and provides you with access from a single management console to all these functions.
We’ll explain in depth in the next section why you need any of these steps to get your site’s DDoS security and show you how to enforce them using MalCare.
How MalCare Helps Protect Your Site Against DDoS Attacks?
It puts up a robust firewall
Your first line of defence against DDoS attacks is a firewall. It reviews all traffic and requests going to your site, as we described earlier. It will block it if it detects an attack or finds a malicious bot trying to reach your site.
The firewall is set up automatically on your site when you instal MalCare. MalCare will be able to reduce the danger of DDoS attacks on your site with the imminent arrival of our new firewall.
From MalCare’s dashboard, you can reach the firewall. Please pick the site and go to Safe.
You will see the Traffic Requests, Password Requests, Admin Logins, and Bot Users for your site here.
MalCare’s firewall gives your site protection against DDoS attacks in two ways:
- Proactively Block Malicious Traffic-A special identifying code called an IP address is required for any user accessing the internet. When a given IP address executes malicious operations, it is detected and blacklisted by the plugin. A listing of these blacklisted IP addresses depends on the firewall. The firewall first tests the IP address against its servers when a visitor’s browser submits a message to your website’s server. The IP address is immediately blocked from accessing the site if it is considered to be blacklisted. Thus, before entering the site, it blocks the hacker.
- Proactively block malicious activity-The firewall can also analyse the type of activity on the website that an IP address is doing, aside from depending on the database. The firewall, for instance, knows from where the login requests normally come from, say the United States. It will flag it as suspect and block it if a hacker in Russia makes incorrect login attempts on your site.
It enables you to monitor traffic requests
Gaining more traffic is one of the key targets of most websites. However, it is suspicious to see a sudden influx of hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site. It could be an indication of a DDoS attack.
You will track the levels of traffic requests being made to your site under MalCare’s Security section. If you find that, for no particular cause, the pace and efficiency of your site is slow, we suggest reviewing this traffic request log.
This platform for protection would inform you how many requests are coming in. It will display the IP address and also the country of origin. This can be used to describe an incoming DDoS attack. This would encourage you to take urgent action, such as taking the site down temporarily and putting it in maintenance mode until the attack gets worse.
It enables geoblocking
Note: If you have no other choice, we do not recommend this form. Using blocking countries only if necessary.
MalCare allows you access to data from all login attempts and traffic requests made on your site, as we just described.
You will begin to note the malicious traffic attempting to reach your website originates from a few particular countries by viewing these logs. The picture below is a screenshot from the Login Requests log of MalCare. There are several unsuccessful and blocked login attempts originating in Romania, you will see.
Our website does not cover Romania, so there is no need for traffic from this country. You can only block all IP addresses originating in Romania in this situation. This is known as blocking or geoblocking of nations.
In only a few taps, you can use MalCare to ban whole countries from accessing your web. To do this, from the toolbar, pick your site and click on ‘Manage’. Here, you’ll find the Geoblock alternative.
Next, pick the countries that you would like to blacklist and press ‘Block Countries’. If required, you can use the same method for unblocking countries later.
It is important to remember that the botnets used in a DDoS attack contain thousands of computers that are typically spread worldwide. Geoblocking is not, however, a complete solution for stopping DDoS attacks. However, it will decrease the likelihood of such attacks. When used in combination with the other steps, this move is especially helpful.
It has an in-built smart malware security scanner
Hackers often, in conjunction with other threats, use DDoS attacks. They inject malware into your website in such situations, which will help them continue their attack.
You need a web security scanner to check for any virus infections if your site is under a DDoS attack.
MalCare will search the web regularly and automatically warn you if something unusual or dangerous is found. Therefore, you should use MalCare to immediately clean it up and avoid any more harm if hackers infect your website with malware.
Which puts an end to the security of your site from DDoS attacks. The risks of such attacks are lowered with the above steps enforced on your web. Plus, in case of any threats, you are covered and armed with a response plan.
Ultimate Thoughts
DDoS attacks used to be just an inconvenience, but a significant cyber threat has developed. It will prove to be very frustrating and costly if hackers succeed in a DDoS assault on your site.
This makes taking proactive precautions against these forms of attacks so necessary. You’ve taken appropriate steps to deter and respond to DDoS threats if you have followed our guide and implemented MalCare on your WordPress account.
Although your site is automatically monitored by MalCare, we suggest that you take advantage of MalCare’s helpful resources to periodically review your site’s operation, traffic, and logins. This helps significantly deter DDoS attacks on your web.