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Incapsula Review: Block Semalt and Protect WordPress Login Page
Posted on April 16, 2015

by Ahmad Al Maaz

Incapsula Review: Block Semalt and Protect WordPress Login Page
Posted on April 16, 2015April 16, 2015 by Ahmad Al Maaz
I’ve been a CloudFlare user since 11/11/13, the reason why I chose them as my CDN provider was because of all the positive reviews that I kept reading about them.

What CloudFlare supposed to do is to protect your site from malicious attacks and make it faster by caching it’s content, but I honestly didn’t see any changes what so ever, but I kept it installed because they do have one great thing that I use which is their DNS management, it’s really easy to use and control, but other than that, CloudFlare felt like just a service that my traffic go through with no purpose.

A Year went by, and my site’s traffic grew, and with more great readers like you started learning about the site, hackers started learning about it as well, also spammers, like Semalt (SEO tool) and Buttons for Website (Sharing tools), that crawled my site everyday and caused fake traffic.




I thought CloudFlare should’ve taken care of both, but sadly no. CloudFlare just let them go through day after day after day…and I wanted a solution, a once and for all kind of solution, something good to replace CloudFlare, and something that could take care of this annoying fake traffic.


How to STOP Semalt and Buttons for Website:
First, I chose the hardcore solution, I opted in for what Joshua McGee had to offer over at The Eclectic Quill.
He wrote a great tutorial on how to block Semalt on servers running Nginx, like the one powering this site.
And it works great, the next day after following his tutorial, both spams stopped from accessing my site.

Blocking Semalt using Incapsula:
While searching for these two spams I came across blog post from the guys at Incapsula, the post talks about the origin of Semalt and what it is all about:

A few months ago Incapsula saw the first indications of a large-scale referrer spam campaign. The focal point of this spam activity was a service named Semalt whose bots were employing referrer spam techniques on an impressive scale and were aggressive enough to draw our (and our clients’) attention.

At the end of their post, something caught my attention, Ofer Gayer Security Researcher at Incapsula wrote:

With the record of Semalt’s spam activity in hand, and with numerous requests to block the service coming from our clients, we added Semalt to our “Bad Bots” rules baseline, blocking it by default for all Incapsula accounts.

Yes, what you’ve read is true. Incapsula is automatically blocking all spam referral from Semalt to all of its users by default. This honestly sounds like a company that cares about their customers and actually doing their job very well. Reading this article got me hocked with Incapsula right away.

If you want to read more things by Ofer, then make sure to read his AMA on Reddit, its great.

Although CloudFlare recently offered a free share SSL Certificate for all of its users, I made the switch because I had two very bad experiences with their customer support and service.1

So I decided to switch from CloudFlare to Incapsula and after more than a month I couldn’t be happier.

Now that I’ve talked about the reason I switched from CloudFlare, let’s talk about what other features I found really great about Incapsula, features that you2 should know about.

Read the the full story on News47ell.com

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