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#40334 More than hunderd attacks in one minute from one IP while Auto ban is set at 4/hour.

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
4.4.3
PHP version
8.1.27
Admin Tools version
7.4.8

Latest post by nicholas on Thursday, 22 February 2024 09:46 CST

Thursday, 22 February 2024 04:35 CST

NicoFaaij

Dear support,

More and more I get hundreds of attacks within 1 minute from just one IP-address. For example, last night I got 149 Suspicious Core Parameter from IP 220.250.61.238 between 2024-02-22 05:00:05 CET and 2024-02-22 05:01:03 CET, without other requests from any other IP-adresses..

I don't understand how this is possible as I have set Auto-ban to 4/hour.

They tried to add SQL selects within URL's of my Community Builder component.

I don't want to give hackers more than 4 options to try to query my Database before they get blocked for 1 day. Do you know why they are able to do so much attacks and how I can reduce that?

Many thanks in advance,

Nico

Thursday, 22 February 2024 04:36 CST

NicoFaaij

Attachment

Thursday, 22 February 2024 04:42 CST

NicoFaaij

3rd try attachment as it was .PNG instead of .png ;-)

Thursday, 22 February 2024 07:37 CST

nicholas

Is it possible that all the request came at around the same time? In this case, multiple server processes are trying to cope with all the requests at once. Since each of these requests spawns a Joomla! application, and the starting state of the temporary IP blocking at application startup does not include the attacker's IP address they are not aware that another process has, is, or will be blocking that IP address at the same time (PHP does not have shared state).

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 22 February 2024 08:29 CST

NicoFaaij

Thanks, Nicholas, for your quick reply,

I think you are right. I see also things like "sleep" and "wait for delay" in those requests, maybe to keep the finishing times of these requests synchronized?

Is there something we can do to stop these brute-force fishing expeditions?

Thursday, 22 February 2024 09:46 CST

nicholas

Yes, you got a very high iowait (the processes marked as you mentioned) exactly because there were many more requests than your server could realistically handle at once.

You can't really stop these requests from coming in. Using something like CloudFlare or Sucuri in front of your site would help, though, as they can detect anomalies at the network level and challenge the requests before they hit your server. That is to say, they present a CAPTCHA to the user hosted on their own server. If the user completes the CAPTCHA correctly, only then does the request hit your server. This is enough to block the vast majority of these brute-force fishing expeditions as you correctly called them.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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