This article is also available in:

What is a malicious request?

A malicious request is a message sent to your site or application with the aim of attacking it rather than using it normally: exploiting a vulnerability, stealing data, hijacking a service. Spotting and blocking it before it reaches your services is part of protecting your hosting.

Reminder: what is a request?

Every time a visitor loads a page, logs in, or submits a form, their browser sends a "request" to your server, which responds. That's the normal back-and-forth of the web. A malicious request travels the same channel, but with hostile intent.

What makes a request malicious

A request is malicious when it's designed to trigger unintended behavior. The main families:

Injections: slipping code into a field (a form, a URL) to try to manipulate your database or server.
Cross-site scripting (XSS): inserting code that would then run in your other visitors' browsers.
Unauthorized access: trying to reach files or areas that shouldn't be accessible.
Exploiting known vulnerabilities: targeting a specific vulnerability in software that hasn't been updated.
Automated abuse: hammering a login form or an API to force access or overwhelm the service.

The common thread: hijacking normal operation to extract access, data, or cause an outage.

How they're spotted

A malicious request often has an unusual shape: characters or patterns that have no business being in a legitimate field, a suspicious target, or an abnormal volume. They're identified through known attack signatures and real-time behavior analysis.
In the interest of honesty: the line isn't always clear-cut. An unusual but legitimate request can be flagged by mistake (a "false positive"). Good protection strikes a balance between blocking what's harmful and letting normal traffic through.

What Hodi does

Filtering these requests is part of the security included with your hosting:

a web application firewall (WAF) analyzes requests and blocks those matching attack patterns, before they reach your services;
our 24/7 monitoring watches for abnormal behavior and continuously adjusts the protection;
security updates reduce the vulnerabilities these requests try to exploit.

Here again, the goal isn't to promise an unbeatable defense, but to significantly reduce the risk and react quickly.

What does this mean for you?

Most of the filtering happens without any action on your part. Your best complementary ally: keeping your applications and extensions up to date, since many malicious requests only target vulnerabilities that have already been patched elsewhere.

Updated on: 17/07/2026

Was this article helpful?

Thank you!