The anatomy of a live attack from China

I am maintaining a free service that provides IT Security news called ITSecurity News. Some time ago, it was called URLAggregator.

It does nothing else than aggregate various IT news websites, selects IT security news and republishing them in the name of the original authors.

I was asking myself why I get so much traffic on this website without having real visitors.

So, I installed the free edition of the WordPress plugin Wordfence in order to study who visits my website.

The results were… surprizing.

 

  • 90% of the traffic was Spiders, Bots, Crawlers from Google, Baidu,
  • 8% of the traffic were attempts to register an account like the one below:

 

China Shanghai, China left http://urlaggregator.net/ and landed on http://urlaggregator.net/forum/member/register
1 hour 19 mins ago   IP: 112.111.160.79 [block]
Browser: IE version 6.0 running on WinXP
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1;)
  • 2% real visitors checking either the website or the RSS feed

This is how an attack from these IP ranges looks like:

112.111.160.0 – 112.111.160.255
222.77.203.1 – 222.77.203.254
222.77.202.1 – 222.77.202.254

 

china-attack

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After adding these rules in Advanced Blocking, the situation looked much better:

Browser Pattern: Block visitors whos browsers match the pattern: crawler
Browser Pattern: Block visitors whos browsers match the pattern: *spider
Browser Pattern: Block visitors whos browsers match the pattern: bot

IP Range: Block visitors with IP addresses in the range: 112.111.160.0 – 112.111.160.255
IP Range: Block visitors with IP addresses in the range: 222.77.203.1 – 222.77.203.254
IP Range: Block visitors with IP addresses in the range: 222.77.202.1 – 222.77.202.254

 

good-traffic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have to say, that slowly I am starting to understand why everybody screams loud that China is doing a cyberwar against… everybody.

 


© Copyright 2013 Sorin Mustaca, All rights Reserved. Written For: Sorin Mustaca on Cybersecurity


Check www.endpoint-cybersecurity.com for seeing the consulting services we offer.

Visit www.itsecuritynews.info for latest security news in English
Besuchen Sie de.itsecuritynews.info für IT Sicherheits News auf Deutsch

Related Posts

Classical Antivirus is dead.Long live EDR?

We recall last year’s article in WSJ  quoted executives from antivirus pioneer Symantec declaring antivirus software “dead” and stating that the company is focusing on developing technologies that attack online threats from a different angle. I also wrote about it here: http://www.sorinmustaca.com/2014/05/08/is-antivirus-really-dead-it-depends-what-you-call-antivirus/   Now the new concept has a name: Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). Kelly Jackson Higgins, […]

What is Pentesting, Vulnerability Scanning, which one do you need?

I get very often asked about these two concepts and I noticed that there is a lot of unclarity around these topics. At the end, I will tell you my own opinion and give you some advices.   Vulnerability scan Also known as Vulnerability Assessment, looks for known vulnerabilities in your systems and reports potential […]

How to check if your DNS Server was hacked

Post initially published in Avira Techblog. You must have heard already about the already “famous” malware DNSChanger which manipulates the DNS settings of the computer in order to silently direct the users to malicious websites. FBI and others took action against this malware and in November 2011 have managed to break the botnet. According to FBI, […]

One thought on “The anatomy of a live attack from China”

  1. Pingback: The anatomy of a live attack from China | Sorin Mustaca's IT Security News aggregated

Comments are closed.