Has my site been compromised or DDoS attacked?

  • Unknown's avatar
    charlesandhistypewriter · Member ·

    This is now my THIRD time reporting this in a week, but I have yet to hear a response. I’ve been getting a lot of traffic from India lately, enough to suspect some sort of bot work at play. What alarms me is that my Clicks are reporting sites (‘adp13a’ ‘smfuzokudei’) that I have NEVER linked to on any of my posts.
    Now, I know I have two-step authentication and haven’t received any unforseen log-in attempts, but I did NOT link to those site – yet WordPress is reporting that they’ve been clicked on.
    Has my site been compromised? Has it been subject to a DDoS or some other attack?

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    I don’t see any other recent support requests from your account. Where did you contact us previously?

    Views by bots and automated traffic referral systems are not counted in WordPress.com stats. If a view is recorded for your site, it means your site was loaded inside an active browser window on a computer, so these are real views. Most likely one of your posts just got shared on social media by someone who in turn has a large following, or else it’s currently appearing on the first page for a popular search term in India.

    What alarms me is that my Clicks are reporting sites (‘adp13a’ ‘smfuzokudei’) that I have NEVER linked to on any of my posts.

    That is a type of referral spam. Essentially someone adds a referrer header to their own site that gets sent to your site when someone clicks on a link to your site on their end. But instead of telling you where that visitor came from, it fools your site into thinking the link was actually clicked on your site. There’s no way to prevent this type of spam, but it also poses no risk at all to your site. Just don’t go clicking on those links to see what they are, as then you’ll be doing exactly what the spammer hopes you’ll do.

    Your site has not been compromised, and there’s no way this kind of referrer spam can compromise your site. A DDoS attack is when someone overloads your server with network requests in an attempt to crash the server to take the site offline, and that is not what is happening here. And WordPress.com has some of the best DDoS protection in the world, besides which anyone wanting to DDoS you would need to attack the entire WordPress.com network, not just your individual site, so your site and account are completely safe.

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