Member Avatar for LilSniper

Sorry if this is the wrong place to put this...I'm not very familiar with all these technical terms.

What do you guys suggest if I believe someone is "DOSing" my forum?

Thanks in advance!

  • 3 Contributors
  • 3 Replies
  • 48 Views
  • 6 Days Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by Tropp

Dani AI

Generated

Good question, — and welcome, . Before assuming a DoS, run a quick triage: check server load, open connections, and web logs to see whether the traffic is malicious or just a sudden legit surge. If you confirm many connections or malformed packets coming from lots of IPs, treat it as a DDoS; if it is a single/few IPs you can often mitigate at the host level. As noted, very large attacks usually need upstream / datacenter hardware filtering.

Practical short steps you can run now to gather evidence and act fast:

  • Look at CPU/network and web server logs (top, vmstat, iostat, tail your forum access/error logs).

  • Find top remote IPs hitting your web port (Linux):

    sudo netstat -anp | grep ':80' | awk '{print $5}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head

  • Capture a short packet trace for your host provider or forensics:

    sudo tcpdump -n -s0 -w /tmp/attack.pcap 'tcp or udp'

If you identify abusive IPs you can temporarily drop them (example):

  sudo iptables -I INPUT -s 1.2.3.4 -j DROP

Short-term mitigations: enable SYN cookies (sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies=1), add simple rate limits at the webserver (nginx/apache modules or mod_evasive/mod_security), and consider fail2ban for layered blocking. For sustained or high-volume attacks contact your host or ISP immediately — they can apply upstream filters or blackholing. For plain-English mitigation options see Cloudflare’s DDoS guide and CISA’s tips: Cloudflare DDoS guide and . Take care when blocking ranges — you can hurt legit users if they share IPs via NAT or CDN.

Recommended Answers

All 3 Replies

Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

what is Dosing ?

Member Avatar for LilSniper

Thanks for the quick reply.

Denial of Service. An electronic attack whose purpose is to prohibit an opponent the
use of a program or an entire system.

Member Avatar for Tropp

It depends on the size of the DDoS.

Anything of reasonable size is going to require a hardware firewall at the DC

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.