I sent a text message to our 28,000 followers via our CMS and now the website is down due to a huge DOS attack. Does this mean one of the phone numbers we have is in some way connected to a bot designed to attack when texted a website link?

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Edit: I have requested my host lift the shutdown due to the attack bc I enabled Under Attack Mode on cloudflare. For now, this seems to have fixed the issue for me.

Edit 2: I understand that this was a DOS attack because on Cloudflare I see a spike of 1,083,000 visitors after the text was sent. Also, we used all GDPR/ Double opt in regulations, so I am confident we have not harassed anyone into a techy-attack on us; the base is waiting for a ticket launch they signed up for on our website.

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3 Comments
  1. How do you know it’s a Denial of Service attack? I deal with high-traffic burst websites in WordPress regularly, and unless you have a very optimized WordPress stack and a dedicated server, even a small amount of bursted traffic to your site will tax the server.

  2. Probably not a bot. More than likely you pissed someone off by texting them an ad and they decided to teach you a lesson. Maybe more than one someone.

    Unless you have explicit permission to text an ad to each number in your database, you shouldn’t do it.

  3. Did the text message have a link to your website in it? Even a small portion of 28,000 people clicking that link at the same time is enough to bring a server to a crawl, especially if you aren’t using any sort of caching.

 

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