perthwebhosting

We have the same issues. We had over 30,000 hits in an hour with ?_wpnonce=xxxxxxxxxxx&add_to_wishlist=###### so what we did was:

edited the .htaccess file

RewriteEngine On Block WooCommerce wishlist/add-to-cart bot pattern
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)_wpnonce=[a-f0-9]+(&|$) [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)add_to_wishlist=[0-9]+(&|$) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ – [F,L] Optional: block combined add-to-cart + wishlist requests
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)add-to-cart=[0-9]+(&|$) [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)add_to_wishlist=[0-9]+(&|$) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ – [F,L]

This makes all connections to go through to a 403 error page. We then saw a reduction but hits continued so we rerouted the DNS through cloudflare, turned on proxying and created a custom rule to only allow connections from certian countries. The load significantly dropped however, we host many sites and only one site is effected and the issue repeats every few weeks as we slowly remove these blocks. We do get the old connection still but not the 30k hits we saw. I think it’s a plugin issue and told our client they can no longer have it or she needs to find another provider.

There is no point blocking IP’s as you be going around in circles.