In reviewing my analytics last week I spotted this little spike in traffic on one of my sites. I’ve actually been seeing this kind of spike on several of my sites for the last couple of months. There may be some correlation to current world events. Certainly not cum hoc ergo propter hoc.
The best part is that all this attempted traffic was handled by CloudFlare without putting any stress on the web server. A Google Analytics plot for the specific hours in question shows the normal traffic load for this little site.
The takeaway from this is that even little web sites need to have Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect them from this kind of attack. CDN protects against Denial of Service (Dos) attacks designed to overload infrastructure. A WAF protect from known threats that intend to infiltrate your server or otherwise sabotage the server itself. CloudFlare is just one player in this market. Automatic, Akamai, and AWS CloudFront provide similar services. If you do not have your site behind a service like this it could be bad.
