What are Security Events?

The Security Events widget shows how many malicious or suspicious requests we’ve stopped before they reached your websites. The number labelled Mitigated Attacks is the total of all requests that were either challenged by StackProtect or blocked outright by our ModSecurity (ModSec) web application firewall.

StackProtect is our bot-protection system. It looks for suspicious behaviour such as repeated login attempts, high-volume scraping, or traffic from known bad networks. When StackProtect steps in, it may show a short CAPTCHA to real visitors and block automated attacks entirely. All of these handled requests are counted in the widget.

ModSecurity sits in front of your sites and inspects each request against a large ruleset of known exploits and attack patterns (for example, common CMS vulnerabilities or injection attempts). Any request that ModSec rejects as unsafe is also added to your Mitigated Attacks widget.