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Investigate High traffic on wmch-demo-01 server (hosting Wikimini)
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Before 2024-01-07, our Switzerland service provider reported a spike in the traffic on the server wmch-mores-demo-01 hosting Wikimini.org and another minor MediaWiki demo, specifically on ports 80 and 443. The unwanted traffic spike is coming mainly from Amazon AWS. Unclear if this is a denial of service or another thing. I can start looking at this in some minutes.

I've found suspicious requests to these binary file:

/var/www/wikimini.org/www/w/skins/Wikimini/resources/images/cursor-edit.cur
/var/www/wikimini.org/www/w/skins/Wikimini_20170128/resources/images/cursor-edit.cur

Put in quarantine under the same directory of T330978

Edited: examined and not malware, restored. Still inspecting.

Some potential root problems:

  • we had no Cache-control mechanisms so, some East crawlers were very aggressive in downloading a lot of stuff
    • → implemented at least 7 days of caching for images/etc.
  • we had no robots.txt and some crawlers loops super-dynamic pages

Anyway, we also banned the specific entry point from Singapore. Probably under control now.

ValerioBoz-WMCH set the point value for this task to 2.5.Feb 8 2024, 2:20 PM

Great! Thanks for solving this and the explanations!

For your info the requests coming from the range of IP connected with the AWS server have been blocked in entrance on the firewall.