The anatomy of a live attack from China

Posted By: Sorin Mustaca March 28, 2013

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:

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

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

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

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Sorin Mustaca

Sorin Mustaca, (ISC)2 CSSLP, CompTIA Security+ and Project+, is working since over 20 years in the IT Security industry and worked between 2003-2014 for Avira as Product Manager for the known products used by over 100 million users world-wide. Today he is CEO and owner of Endpoint Cybersecurity GmbH focusing on Cybersecurity, secure software development and security for IoT and Automotive. He is also running his personal blog Sorin Mustaca on Cybersecurity and is the author of the free eBook Improve your security .