Hi all - I'm working with a firewall administrator who is evaluating a recent seeming DDOS attack, where several thousands of requests appended different extended numerical path elements to a legitimate page URL, which apparently caused a lot of resource usage and produced a temporary outage.
I was explaining to him the native DNN behavior where, if a child path element doesn't exist, DNN returns the parent path element/page instead. Some research he did indicated that DNN evaluation of that scenario may be overwhelming the server - and his proposal is to change that behavior to return a 404 instead for a missing child path element; I know that the actual behavior is there for a reason, and is dependent on the modules involved dynamically creating elements, and whether the path elements (in a friendly URL) actually represent path elements or query parameters, which can be hard to discern at times.
Is there a good resource somewhere explaining how and why this all works the way it does? I would like to understand it more completely.
Thanks! David
I doubt that was a Dos Attacked, there are far better ways to create DoS. Just good Caching practise would probably be good enough to stop DoS on a public visible page that a robot what hitting. And what is severing the 404 page to make it better? I presume a load balance server?
I think DNN is doing it basically right, you want everyone to find something on your website, not 404s.
If you do want to stop any URL from hitting the DNN installation/Server, you can implement a load balance server which filters valid URL before passing them to the DNN server.
I tried to post the ChatGPt answerm which is good, but I got security warning. But try chatgpt.
The reason for this is that DNN uses "child urls" for things like edit and settings links and it also allows modules to create and process "detail" urls. As an example; the blog module. It interprets the url and if that contains a blog entry id, it renders a detail view instead of the list view. Our SEO redirect module allows you to force a 404 on certain pages (you have to be sure there's not module with "details" on that page or these will not work any more.
See: https://www.40fingers.net...cts/DNN-SEO-Redirect
The Force404 option
BTW I always amazes me how many bots just try random urls.. We see that on all the sites we host..
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