We get asked about protecting WordPress login and XML-RPC from abuse more than almost anything else, so here is the long answer.
What we changed
We moved the decision from a single threshold to a continuous score, added an explanation to every decision and made every rule testable against historical traffic before it goes live.
The result is fewer late-night pages for our analysts and — more importantly — fewer real users challenged by mistake.
Why per-route baselines matter
A thousand requests per second to your homepage is Tuesday. A thousand requests per second to your password-reset endpoint is an attack. Global rate limits cannot tell the difference; per-route baselines can.
We learn the normal shape of traffic per route and per hour of the week, so a surge on a sensitive endpoint raises the risk score long before it approaches a global threshold.
The numbers
Across the last quarter, 71% of challenged clients never attempted a solution, 24% solved one challenge and then behaved normally, and 5% solved challenges repeatedly while continuing to attack — the last group is where analysts spend their time.
Median added latency for legitimate visitors that were challenged was 280 ms on desktop and 410 ms on mid-range Android devices.
Testing in production, safely
Every rule starts in log mode. We replay the previous seven days of traffic through it and show exactly which requests it would have affected before anyone can promote it to challenge or block.
This one feature has prevented more incidents than any detection we have ever shipped.
What actually happens during a flood
The first thing to fail during a layer 7 flood is almost never bandwidth. It is connection slots, worker processes or database connections on the origin — resources measured in hundreds or thousands, not gigabits. An attacker who can make each request expensive only needs a few thousand requests per second.
That is why we score requests before they are proxied. By the time a request reaches your origin, it has been attributed to a client, compared against that client’s history and weighed against the current load on the route it targets.
The economics behind it
A booter service rents out a 100 Gbps attack for less than the price of a pizza. Defending against it with bandwidth alone is a race you lose. Defending against it by making each malicious request cost more than it earns is a race you win.
This is the entire idea behind never metering attack traffic: our costs scale with filtering, not with your invoice.
Observability first
Every mitigation decision is logged with its reasons, and every log line can be traced to the rule and score components that produced it. When a customer asks why a request was challenged, the answer is a link, not a guess.
Logs stream to the customer’s SIEM within seconds, which also means their security team sees attacks in the same tools they use for everything else.
We will follow up with the numbers from the next quarter.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.