Hit every minute
Today, and for the first time (and hopefully the last), I had to deny an IP address access to my site. Starting at around 9:00 AM, I had the following IP hitting the same post on my blog at a rate of once per minute:
It continued all the way until after 5:00 PM. I figured that it could not be someone hitting the browser’s refresh button every minute for 8 hours! So it must be a spam bot or something like that. I had to stop it by denying the offending IP access to my blog.
Related articles:
Filed in Personal on 10 Oct 05 | Tags: blog, statistics
Is that some free reporting software?
Sorry for the double commenting, but I thought I’d mention that you may want to block this IP entirely to anything on your subnet. I keep getting hit by people trying SSH, FTP, and every other protocol known to man. I ended up running a firewall on the Linux box as well. Layered security can be painful, but it is a necessity these days.
Tom, I use StatCounter.com for my real time web stats. I find it to be the best among similar services.
My web host has an option to block all traffic from specific IP addresses or an IP range. I used this option to block this IP entirely.
As far as protecting my network at home, I have a router (that acts as a hardware firewall) and Norton Internet Security (as a software firewall). I cannot imagine a home PC without a firewall, you’ll be hacked in no time, especially if you have an always-on Internet connection (like cable or DSL).
Hi Eddie,
You can check with http://www.completewhois.com to see who the guy is. Although it is annoying, one hit per minute is nothing. I was hit 20,000 times per day recently for a few days from different IP addresses and also a couple of weeks ago 30,000 hits in one day from another.
It seems odd that your guy has no referrer URL which is the normal method for referral spammers. They tend to spam sites that do not publish referrers such as mine because they don’t check, they use a scatter gun approach. The fact that your guy has no referrer URL makes me think it might be a technical issue his end?
good luck Eddie, hope you don’t get too much of this.
Pete, thanks for the link, it is very useful. I have been using http://www.dnsstuff.com/ for such things.
Certainly, one hit a minute should not be a threat to a web server but still is annoying. 30,000 hits/day, now that’s very annoying, unless they are from legitimate users
Thanks and good luck to you too.
I’ve posted a response to Eddie off comment, but to put your mind at rest you can see that the browser is OPera 8.5 which has a cool feature to refresh a page every minute / 5 / 10 etc.
I used it for a forum I was using and it looks like I may have reused the window without reseting it from weblogs.macromedia.com and left it running in the background while I was working.
I do aplogise and no harm was meant.
Cheers.
Kev, I have received your off-comment message. No harm done so no worry. That also explains Pete’s wondering about why there was no referrer URL.
Thank you for letting me know it was you, a legitimate reader of my blog. I appreciate it. I will be removing the restriction on your IP address, just in case you want to come by later.