Something super strange is going on with my website, this month I’ve had over 100k 404 errors on URLs which do not exist from random IPs in Germany (95%) and a few other countries. I’ve been using AIOS and Wordfence to blacklist IPs and user agents and monitor the situation, it’s reducing but still on-going.
Though today I noticed something super strange, there were over 60 404 errors inside a 1 minute window from my own IP address, I only noticed because Wordfence locked me out due to a rule I have set up.
Once I got back in I checked the logs and there are pages I absolutely didn’t visit in that time frame (they also don’t exist at all), so I don’t really understand what is going on.
I whitelisted my IP to avoid getting locked out, but I’m not sure if that’s even a good thing as if someone out there is somehow spoofing my IP to brute force my site or exceed my bandwidth limit then maybe I should keep it blocked?
Has anyone ran into this issue before? Any other advice or resources to look at?
This is definitely putting a few grey hairs on my head.
Thanks for any help!
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Is “my ip” your PC/device, or your web server’s ip address? If it’s your web server, and you’re using a caching plugin like WP Rocket, then the ip hits are the caching plugin building the cache.
What are the 404 URLs? Perhaps you have links in your site pointing to dead page?
When you block these malicious IPs search their network – if they come from a VPN provider for example block their entire range – save you coming back and blocking the IPs one by one.