How can I tell if I'm being attacked?

When experiencing a DoS or DDoS attack, the first thing you will most likely notice is that your server is unresponsive or is very slow to respond.

Check your Bandwidth Graphs

The first thing you should do is check your server's bandwidth graphs. You can do this through our control panel by visiting your Bandwidth Statistics page and viewing the past 24 hours or even the past hour alone. If you see that your traffic has spiked and the port is fully saturated (or close to it), you are most likely under attack.

Please note that the Enterprise DDoS Protected IP's will not show in the Security Center and the bandwidth stats will not show the attack unless the protection is failing.

Identify and Block Attackers

If you have some connectivity to your server, you can attempt to block some of the attack by blocking IP addresses having several connections to your server. Use the following command to list your active connections by IP address:

netstat -ntu | awk '{print $5}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

You can then use IP Tables, or the firewall of your choice, to block all traffic from that IP address.

An IP Tables example would be: :

/sbin/iptables -I INPUT -s x.x.x.x -p tcp -j DROP
/sbin/iptables -I INPUT -s x.x.x.x -p udp -j DROP

This would cause all TCP and UDP traffic to be dropped from this specific IP address (represented by x.x.x.x).

Helpful Articles on Blocking Attackers

• WHT -- DDoS Deflate

  • (D)DoS Deflate is a lightweight bash shell script designed to assist in the process of blocking a denial of service attack. It utilizes the command below to create a list of IP addresses connected to the server, along with their total number of connections. It is one of the simplest and easiest to install solutions at the software level.

• cyberciti.biz -- tcptrack

  • tcptrack is a sniffer which displays information about TCP connections it sees on a network interface. It passively watches for connections on the network interface, keeps track of their state and displays a list of connections in a manner similar to the unix 'top' command. It displays source and destination addresses and ports, connection state, idle time, and bandwidth usage.

Notify Limestone

If you have no connectivity to your server, or the blocks you have put into place are not stopping the attack, open a ticket with our Support department. We will do our best to mitigate the attack and restore connectivity to your server quickly.