How Czech Budweis protected the city website from attacks.
A case study of deploying WEDOS Global Protection for a city serving tens of thousands of residents daily, and keeping critical digital services running at the moments that matter most.
The city website as a key service for citizens.
The official website of the City of Czech Budweis is one of the most important sources of information for residents and visitors. People use it for official documents, forms, contacts, transport information, cultural events, and crisis communication.
A simple rule applies: when the city website does not work, citizens notice immediately.
The main purpose of the city website is clear: to be a reliable information portal for citizens 24/7. Every day, thousands of people visit it looking for current information, documents, office hours, and official announcements.
The city rates website availability on a scale of 1 to 5 as 4 to 5 — as highly critical. It is especially important in situations such as floods, fires, or other emergencies, when citizens need verified information from a single official source.
- ✓ Interactive maps
- ✓ Static forms to download and fill in
- ✓ Clear information about the activities of the City Hall and city organizations
The website is maintained by a combination of an internal IT team and an external supplier; in practice, roughly three people are involved in its operation. In addition to the main city portal, the city also operates several smaller specialized websites — for example for projects such as Juvel, the adaptation strategy, or the Slávie sports complex.
Hundreds of thousands of users. Millions of requests.
Website traffic is very high and stable, which also makes it an attractive target. Having visibility and control over this traffic is essential.
An estimated hundreds of thousands of page views per month. The vast majority of traffic comes from the Czech Republic; foreign visits are mainly bots and automated systems that index or test the website. That is why it is important to have control over robotic traffic.
Summer 2024: repeated attacks and three half-day outages.
The year 2024 was demanding for public-sector IT teams. Many authorities in the Czech Republic and abroad faced coordinated attacks targeting websites of cities, hospitals, and regional institutions. Czech Budweis became part of this broader wave in July and August 2024.
The website was targeted by attacks that:
- × Significantly slowed down page loading
- × Led to website unavailability
- × Overloaded the infrastructure with extremely long search queries that gradually exhausted the server's computing capacity
According to the IT team, the situation typically appeared early in the morning, peaked around noon, and repeated three times, each time resulting in roughly a half-day outage. For a city website that should be available to citizens continuously, this was unacceptable.
The city was looking for a solution that:
- ✓ Would protect the website from bursty and malicious traffic
- ✓ Would prevent outages and significant slowdowns
- ✓ Would not burden administrators with complex management
- ✓ Would fit into the existing infrastructure, including externally managed DNS
In cooperation with WEDOS, a consultation took place and the decision was made to deploy WEDOS Global Protection as a protective layer on top of the existing setup.
Deployment within a few hours.
The deployment of WGP took place in August 2024, during the ongoing period of increased attacks. The entire process took only a few hours.
It was necessary to:
After switching traffic through WEDOS Global Protection, there was no deterioration in the user experience. The IT team notes, with a bit of exaggeration, that the website certainly did not slow down — quite the opposite.
Calm operation and no outages.
WEDOS Global Protection continuously intercepts tens of thousands of suspicious HTTP requests per month. These are mainly bots, scanning, and attempts to overload the application. Protection reacts according to the type of behavior:
The request is blocked outright, for example based on reputation, signature, a rule, or an obviously malicious pattern.
Requests are limited by a rate limit, typically at a high frequency from a single IP or to sensitive URLs such as search or login.
In the grey zone, verification or a gentler form of filtering is applied.
Thanks to this, suspicious traffic does not reach the application at full strength and does not consume resources that should serve citizens.
- ✓ Attacks stopped causing slowdowns or outages
- ✓ The website began responding stably even during load peaks
- ✓ Malicious traffic is automatically filtered out before it burdens the city's infrastructure
- ✓ Operation has been calm and outage-free in the long term
Monitoring and benefits for administrators
One of the valued benefits is a real-time overview of what is happening on the website. Administrators have statistics and charts available, for example in Grafana. This allows them to plan capacity better and respond quickly if unusual behavior appears.
- ✓ Traffic peaks
- ✓ Types of blocked requests
- ✓ The overall load on the infrastructure
Website availability as a public service.
An outage of a city website today does not mean only a "technical problem". In practice, it can cause:
- × Loss of important information for residents
- × Negative reactions on social networks
- × Complications in the office's communication
- × Confusion in crisis situations — for example during floods or fires, when people rely on official sources
Even though part of crisis communication shifts to mobile channels, the website remains the central information point that citizens return to.
„Since deploying WGP, we have peace."
Protect your public services the same way.
The city would recommend the service without hesitation to other public-sector institutions that want to be confident their website will hold up in demanding situations — whether it is a sudden traffic spike or targeted attacks.