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Last week one of our Associates contacted us for support on a site we weren’t managing at the time. There had been 954 spam orders placed via WooCommerce, all using what we assume to be stolen card credentials.
Stripe blocked most payment attempts immediately, though a couple initially went through. Our concern – and the Client’s – was more that the orders had been created in the first place.
We immediately installed our CloudHost Protect Anti-Spam service on the site. This checks for known bad IP or Email addresses as well as suspicious patterns on any form submission – comments, registration, contact forms, etc – but also checks WooCommerce orders, moving suspicious orders to a different folder for ease of management and preventing processing until verified.
Suspicious activity continued for a couple of days but the attempts were mostly blocked.
We’ve always promoted our services as providing “security as standard“. Unlike some other providers we have never charged extra for SSL certificates, backups, DNS SEC protection, or our CloudHost Protect service. We usually install WordFence on managed sites and configure it (lots of providers skip this vital step) for optimal security.
Whilst updating the settings on this site, we installed an additional service to provide another layer of protection. This plugin checks files for any changes or suspicious code, logs site access attempts and blocks known bad IP addresses or user-agent strings. We were impressed with the ease of use and efficiency of the service and added it to a couple of other sensitive sites. It allows us to manage our own block/allow lists and see site actions centrally.
Then we added a few more, found additional options, grew even more impressed and decided to just go all-in and throw a few hundred pounds at it!
We are now offering this additional level of security on all managed sites at no additional charge.
If you have a managed WordPress site with us you’ll now see two CloudHost Protect plugins – CloudHost Protect Anti-Spam and CloudHost Protect Security. Both are already configured to provide optimal protection against spam, attacks, malware and more. If you have basic hosting, contact us if you want these services added to your site. We can also provide you with access to an external control panel with more detailed log and analysis history.
