This is very common that we face Bad Bots attacking our website, it seems like dos attack coming on our website to hack it. In result of that your website can ran out of bandwidth or it can be hacked during this attack. Another issue caused by this is slow speed issue raises on your website browsing, all of this happens because a tons of fake crawlers / bad bots comes in bulk to open certain urls of your website. And normal website traffic stats usually track it as a friendly bots but its not likely that.
Now a days software’s exists that can name any bot as Google too, means bad bots can dodge your traffic counters easily and can cause serious issue to your bandwidth or end result will be hacking of your website. So how to get rid of this issue!
We have a test case to study it here;
We have a website which built over WordPress and its hosted on a Linux Server with cPanel on it, that website comes up with 20GB bandwidth usage in 72 hrs without any human traffic on it. So we decided to check it for the reason and to solve the issue. Here are some steps we took to check either its an attack or not.
1. We checked AW Stats inside cPanel (Hosting Control Panel) that clearly shows us a crawler named Google consumed all the bandwidth.
2. To further examine it, we install a plugin named (Wordfence) on wordpress and go its tools section to check its live traffic. It shows a series of hits on xmlrpc.php and wp-login.php files. So its confirmed now that our website is under attack of a crawler named (Google Bot) Google usually not attempts such huger number of visits in such time. Its about more than 4 lac hits in 72 hrs.
So now we are cleared that our website is under attack of a Bad Bot. So how to fix this! We have made a video on it as well you can see it at the end of this blog. Here are the brief steps we took out to solve this issue without paying anything.
1. Block bots or limit visits of bots by wordfence plugin. (See video about how we do that)
2. Add your website to Cloudflare and activate Attack Mode. (See video about how we do that)
For more information and questions you can contact us any time.
