Mars Attacks!!! Ack, Ack-Ack!

Rich Marshall
Jul 26, 2017 · 2 min read

Last Tuesday we saw our first (recognised DDoS attack. At 12:09 GMT we started to see an increase in XML-RPC GET requests against our marketing site, hosted on WordPress. We don’t serve XMLRPC so we knew this was non-valid traffic for a start.

By 12:11 GMT traffic volumes were well above what the system could handle and the ELBs started to return 503 responses. By 12:20 GMT the request rate was over 250 x higher than usual. At this point, we were trying to establish what was causing the demand. We don’t currently have the highest coverage of monitoring over our marketing sites so this took us a little while. Eventually, by 12:30, using the ELB logs, we had managed to establish we were seeing requests from all over the world, all making GET requests to /xmlrpc.php. We don’t typically see requests from China, Serbia, Thailand and Russia, among others so it was pretty obvious this was a straight forward DDoS attack.

Shortly after 12:30 GMT the request rate drops off just as quickly as it started and by 12:35 GMT it was over and the site recovered. Either the BotNet Attack got bored, they had achieved their purpose (investigation into the consequence of the attack continues with our security partner) or AWS Shield did its free, little-known job and suppressed the attack…

Whatever led to the attack, it passed as quickly as it arrived, and from initial assessment had little purpose. At least we’ve had our first taste of an attack and will be able to better tackle the next one. In the meantime, we continue to analyse logs to determine if there was any more to the attack than a simple DDoS, or if there was something more malicious intended.


Originally published at wealthwizards.io on July 26, 2017.