Quarantine your domain

Overview

Appwarden lets you instantly quarantine your domain with a single Discord or Slack command, immediately disabling all user interaction to mitigate active security breaches. This is known as quarantining your domain.

When quarantined, all users are redirected to a static page of your choice, effectively preventing your website from potentially harming users in a worst case scenario. During a security breach, this instant quarantine capability can mean the difference between containing the incident and suffering catastrophic damage to your reputation and user assets.

Prerequisites

To enable Appwarden to quarantine your domain, please complete the Getting Started guide. The guide will walk you through connecting your Discord server or Slack workspace, installing the Appwarden middleware, creating an API token, and verifying your domain.

Commands

Quarantine your domain

To quarantine your domain, issue the following command from your Discord server or Slack channel:

DiscordSlack

Run in your Discord server

/quarantine lock

After selecting a domain, Appwarden will respond with a confirmation message and quarantine your domain after a few seconds. All users will be redirected to a static page of your choice.

Quarantine your domain with a single command to disable all user interaction

In order to quarantine a domain, the domain must be verified. Verify your domain status by navigating to Settings > Security in the Appwarden dashboard and checking the Domain Verification card.

Unlock your domain

To unlock your domain and enable users to interact with your website, issue the following command from your Discord server or Slack channel:

DiscordSlack

Run in your Discord server

/quarantine unlock

Unlock your domain with a command to restore normal traffic flow

In order to unlock a domain, the domain must be verified. Verify your domain status by navigating to Settings > Security in the Appwarden dashboard and checking the Domain Verification card.

Test your domain

To test if Appwarden is correctly configured to quarantine your domain, lock your domain and then unlock it after confirming the lock page appears:

DiscordSlack

Run in your Discord server

/quarantine lock

Navigate to your domain in your browser. You should be redirected to your configured lock page. Once you have confirmed the lock page appears, unlock your domain:

DiscordSlack

Run in your Discord server

/quarantine unlock

Test your installation to ensure Appwarden is configured and ready to protect your domain

Customizing the lock page

When you quarantine your domain, Appwarden redirects all users to a static page of your choice. To set up a lock page, create a new route in your project that renders a message to your users informing them that the domain is temporarily unavailable.

The /maintenance route is a common choice for a lock page because it can be used as both a maintenance and a lock page.

Create a lock page to inform users that your domain is temporarily unavailable

On Cloudflare

In your domain configuration file, update the middleware entry with your desired lock-page-slug and push the changes to your domain configuration repository, then redeploy your middleware.

On Vercel

In your Appwarden middleware configuration, set the lockPageSlug to the route that renders your lock page. For example, if your lock page is at /maintenance, set the lockPageSlug to /maintenance.

src/middleware.ts

export default createAppwardenMiddleware({
  lockPageSlug: "/maintenance",
})