DDOS Hack

Hi,

Our site is getting hacked by simplepie.org. They are hitting our feed hundreds of times within a minute which is causing the site to crash. It seems like it is coming from the rss feed. Is there anyway to shut of the RSS functionality?

Here is a small snippet of our logs;

173.199.184.232 - - [07/Apr/2016:17:15:21 -0500] "GET /blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss HTTP/1.1" 301 228 "http://venturacountywest.com/blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss"; "SimplePie/1.2 (Feed Parser; http://simplepie.org; Allow like Gecko) Build/20090627192103"
173.199.184.232 - - [07/Apr/2016:17:15:21 -0500] "GET /blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss HTTP/1.1" 500 - "http://venturacountywest.com/blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss"; "SimplePie/1.2 (Feed Parser; http://simplepie.org; Allow like Gecko) Build/20090627192103"
173.199.184.232 - - [07/Apr/2016:17:15:21 -0500] "GET /blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss HTTP/1.1" 500 - "http://venturacountywest.com/blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss"; "SimplePie/1.2 (Feed Parser; http://simplepie.org; Allow like Gecko) Build/20090627192103"
173.199.184.232 - - [07/Apr/2016:17:15:21 -0500] "GET /blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss HTTP/1.1" 500 - "http://venturacountywest.com/blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss"; "SimplePie/1.2 (Feed Parser; http://simplepie.org; Allow like Gecko) Build/20090627192103"
173.199.184.232 - - [07/Apr/2016:17:15:21 -0500] "GET /blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss HTTP/1.1" 500 - "http://venturacountywest.com/blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss"; "SimplePie/1.2 (Feed Parser; http://simplepie.org; Allow like Gecko) Build/20090627192103"
173.199.184.232 - - [07/Apr/2016:17:15:21 -0500] "GET /blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss HTTP/1.1" 500 - "http://venturacountywest.com/blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss"; "SimplePie/1.2 (Feed Parser; http://simplepie.org; Allow like Gecko) Build/20090627192103"
173.199.184.232 - - [07/Apr/2016:17:15:21 -0500] "GET /blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss HTTP/1.1" 500 - "http://venturacountywest.com/blog/latest?format=feed&type=rss"; "SimplePie/1.2 (Feed Parser; http://simplepie.org; Allow like Gecko) Build/20090627192103"

Thanks,
Mendel