Our website wass behaving strangely. Sometime it was down and nothing was accessible. Sometime it started loading but pages browsing was too slow. We checked apache logs and found the below suspicious entries:
[Fri Dec 28 00:47:47 2018] [error] [client 212.237.1.209] File does not exist: /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/css
[Fri Dec 28 00:47:47 2018] [error] [client 212.237.1.209] script '/usr/share/phpMyAdmin/config.user.inc.php' not found or unable to stat
[Fri Dec 28 00:47:47 2018] [error] [client 212.237.1.209] script '/usr/share/phpMyAdmin/config_inf.php' not found or unable to stat
[Fri Dec 28 00:47:47 2018] [error] [client 212.237.1.209] File does not exist: /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/4.2
[Fri Dec 28 00:47:48 2018] [error] [client 212.237.1.209] File does not exist: /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/scripts
[Fri Dec 28 00:47:48 2018] [error] [client 212.237.1.209] File does not exist: /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/config
[Fri Dec 28 00:47:48 2018] [error] [client 212.237.1.209] File does not exist: /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/scripts
[Fri Dec 28 00:47:48 2018] [error] [client 212.237.1.209] File does not exist: /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/config
[Fri Dec 28 01:03:28 2018] [error] [client 115.159.111.47] File does not exist: /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/scripts
[Fri Dec 28 01:03:28 2018] [error] [client 115.159.111.47] File does not exist: /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/scripts
[Fri Dec 28 01:03:28 2018] [error] [client 115.159.111.47] File does not exist: /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/scripts
[Fri Dec 28 01:03:28 2018] [error] [client 115.159.111.47] File does not exist: /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/scripts
Our quick backup response was to block these client IPS
Moreover we also found the below entries in logs:
[Mon Dec 24 07:17:26 2018] [error] [client 91.121.134.18] Empty module and/or action after parsing the URL "/api/ip.php" (/).
Detail about above log entry: https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/91.121.134.18?page=2#report. We also blocked these IPS
I want to know what was going on? Was it DDOS attack or something else? For now I have blocked the suspicious IPs however what is the permanent solutions/tricks to limit/end these type of attacks?