We will never limit the rate of our development process! 

The rate of cyber attacks grows without limits day by day!

Hmm, can you guess the topic of our new release note? 😏

Yes, it is about Rate Limiting. Our users have asked for it and we delivered: with the 2.29.0 version of BitNinja, we introduced the Rate Limiting feature.

Rate limiting is an important technology in cybersecurity. To put it simply, it’s a way of limiting network traffic over a certain period to stop badly behaving bots and other malicious parties from attacking.

One of the most important use cases of rate limiting is to prevent a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack and to stop a user from exhausting the system’s resources. To this end, even highly scalable systems should have limits implemented at some level. Though our DoS module provides crucial defense against DoS Attacks 24/7, Rate Limiting adds a new layer of difficulty for malicious parties against overwhelming the system. Without these important layers the system could be flooded with requests for information, which hurts memory consumption, storage and network capacity.

Now with our newest update, you can easily enable the Rate Limiting feature, or if you want to take a deep dive, you can even configure it to suit your specific needs. You can: 

• set a limit for the all-over number of connections per domain, and
• change the time period in which the limit takes effect.

The feature is based on the WAF and SSLTerminating modules. That means for setting up your very own Rate Limiting configuration you have to enable the WAF module. We recommend for you enable this module: while the other BitNinja modules block attacks that need multiple trials, like DoS or brute force attacks, SQL injections or Hexa botnet attacks need to be stopped before they can reach your server, and the WAF 2.0 module is perfect for that.

• Check out our Knowledge Base to get to know more about Rate Limiting configurations.
• You can follow our short guide on how to set up the WAF module.
• We have an article that shows you how you can utilize the WAF module and how you can use its full potential with some fine-tuning.

Also, we cannot resist telling you a hint: you will soon be able to configure this directly from your dashboard, so stay tuned!