The shadow of cyberattacks is lengthening, and their impact is felt worldwide. Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks targeting online services and websites have become a weapon of choice for digital saboteurs. While these attacks are often seen as but a scratch on the surface of a much deeper issues, their sheer frequency and scale paint a sobering picture.
As the attacks target governments and regular businesses alike, they have evolved into a tool for strategic disruption, underscoring the universal need for continuous preparedness towards threats, as well as proactive cybersecurity.
Artificial Intelligence Helps Hackers
What happens when artificial intelligence is harnessed for mischief? Malware is constantly evolving. For example, AI can be used in brute-force attacks that attempt to break into websites by guessing users’ passwords. As a result attacks of this kind are a whole more sophisticated than before. It’s crucial that all users are encouraged to use a password that’s strong enough, so that user accounts are protected from traditional brute-force bots as well as AI-powered crawlers.
At Seravo, all WordPress sites are protected against brute-force attacks and repeated login attempts by default. It’s also important to ensure the users accounts on your site have good password hygiene and use multi-factor authentication (MFA, 2FA). Read our previously published tips on how to take care of password hygiene, and remember to check our knowledge base for instructions on how to enable two-factor authentication on your WordPress site.
Additionally, Seravo monitors its customers’ websites 24 hours a day, every day of the year. We are constantly on standby to react to any and all security incidents and denial-of-service attacks.
What Are DoS Attacks?
In a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, a massive number of simultaneous requests are sent to a website, with the intention of using up all of its resources and thereby preventing access for its visitors. When these requests come from multiple different sources (such as a botnet), we’re talking about a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. These distributed attacks are particularly challenging to fend off because they can look like normal, totally harmless web traffic.
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are especially harmful because they can take down multiple services simultaneously if they strike critical server infrastructure.
As Cyber Attacks Evolve
Today, digital service providers are facing increasingly complex attacks. These can be called multi-vector attacks, which combine different attack types. These new types can be harder to detect with conventional tools. Additionally, attackers can try to overwhelm a target’s entire network bandwidth with massive amounts of data.
Seravo monitors its customers’ sites for malicious traffic more effectively than before. You can read more about WordPress security at Seravo, or check out our FAQ about security. If you prefer a more hands-on approach and want to learn more about additional security settings in WordPress, check out Seravo’s knowledge base.
The Possible Consequences of a DoS Attack
Regardless of the type of a DoS attack, the outcome is always the same: the website gets overloaded with useless and unwanted traffic. All of the server’s resources are consumed with excess, and the site can no longer respond to visitor requests.
These attacks have the power to affect business operations, or affect the user experience of your regular website visitors. Unlike an unintentional spike in web traffic, a DoS attack is always a deliberate act intended to prevent the public from accessing the web service’s content. What’s more, non-malicious tools, such as those designed for load testing may be used in an attack.
DoS attacks are especially harmful because they can take down multiple services simultaneously if they strike critical server infrastructure. To minimize risks, it is critical to ensure regular updates, use two-factor authentication, and invest in strong password hygiene.
At Seravo, critical security updates are always installed without delay, even if the automatic and tested updates available in our service have been turned off.
Prepare for Cyber Threats
There are many ways to prepare for attacks targeting your site, and the most important one is to ensure that your website’s most critical content is effectively cached. This makes sure that the site will load as well as possible, even under sudden traffic loads or attacks. In some instances, you might also want to plan a completely separate, lightweight version of the site for emergencies that is completely independent of the main site.
Caching is a key part of the performance and security of all websites. Seravo’s hosting for WordPress is designed so that caching is included in our service by default, and you don’t need any extra plugins to improve your site’s efficiency.
If needed, you can also order site optimization as an additional service from Seravo. We can proactively identify and resolve any performance bottlenecks together, improving your site’s resilience against future threats.
Robust Security by Seravo
Seravo’s hosting for WordPress architecture is built with the potential for DoS/DDoS attacks and other cyber threats in mind. Efficient load balancing, caching, advanced monitoring and filtering of malicious web traffic are examples of the mechanisms that help sites survive sudden load situations and attacks. We also take care of your site’s security in other ways.
When your site is hosted ar Seravo, you also get a unique security guarantee for your website: if we detect malicious code, we’ll clean up your site for free! With Seravo, you are never alone with your website or WordPress.
We Improve Security Continuously
Website protection at Seravo is expanding even further with a Web Application Firewall (WAF). Seravo has always had required protection and monitoring in place, but WAF makes this layer of protection more dynamic, and constantly monitors traffic between the client and the server. WAF protects websites from vulnerabilities that could otherwise lead to data breaches or website hijacking.
With these updates, Seravo offers its customers even more flexible tools for managing their website security. In the future, our WP Enterprise customers will be able to customize restrictions for their sites and create their own set of rules to block suspicious traffic. These rules can block requests from specific IP addresses or deny access to certain parts of the site, for example.
The WAF also automatically improves website performance by blocking malicious traffic before it even reaches the site. This reduces server load and speeds up the website’s operation. In this way, we can guarantee that websites are both secure and perform brilliantly.
Trust Our WordPress Expertise!
Do you have a question about security on your website, or got something to ask about security in WordPress? Do you wish to ensure that your site is ready to face online threats now and in the future? Get in touch with Seravo’s WordPress experts, and let’s make sure your website stays safe!
Useful Links
- F-Secure: What is a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS)?
- Hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks skyrocket: Cloudflare’s 2025 Q2 DDoS threat report
