My Website Is Being Attacked By Robots?

by allanlim

Posted: 13 years ago 14 replies

PROGRAMMING

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this question.

Has any of you experienced similar situation before?

But my wordpress blog is seeing strange traffic activity.

Basically, my website is receiving around 100 visitors a day on average.

But today, I log in to my statscounter account.
It has only been 2 hours and yet I have already gotten 400 visitors.

I realized that all these visitors are 'faked'.
Bascially, they came from Bing, from a keyword that I am ranking
number one in Bing search engine.

I suspect someone is using an automatic robot and keep on clicking
on my site in the search engine.

How do I stop this attack?
I check the IP address but the IP address keeps on changing.
What can I do about that.

It has been 12 hours and that particular page of my site is still getting visitors from
the same keyword at a rate of 4 fake visitors per minutes, which is around 200 fake
visitors per hour.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

#attacked #robots #website

mandrake 13 years ago

Have you contacted your hosting provider to see if they can look into it?
I use liquidweb with a dedicated server and they were able to figure out how to make it stop...
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Ian Varnava 13 years ago

Probably one of your competitors messing with you, using proxies. Not really a way to stop it (as far as I know) unless you knew which specific proxies they were using.

Just a theory.

Your hosting provider definitely may be able to help though.
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- allanlim 13 years ago
  
  The problem is my webhosting cannot help me.
  
  Which is why I am feeling so frustrated.
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  allanlim 13 years ago
  
  Any other solution?
  
  Do you know any third parties that might be able to help?
  
  Thanks
  
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DPM70 13 years ago

Is the common denominator (root) of the IP address that is hitting you the same? I guess you would have thought of that? I think we all get all kinds of crap hitting us when trying to rank or, even, are successfully ranking.

If your host cannot help you then I cant either, apart from saying don't let it worry you too much right now. I bet another Warrior will have a better idea about how to stem this.
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DPM70 13 years ago

I'd have to add that that I'm on hostgator and if I reported something like this then they would usually have a decent response. Are you not getting any love out of your hosting?
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- allanlim 13 years ago
  
  I am thinking of using the services of Sucuri, which help monitor your website and protect your website from being hacked.
  
  But I doubt they will be able to help me with this particular issue.
  
  Anyway, I have contacted their support and waiting for their reply.
  
  Meanwhile, I am just wondering if any of you have signed up for any services that offers to protect your website or solve your website problems?
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  allanlim 13 years ago
  
  Ian Varnava,
  
  I guess you are right.
  
  Currently, the rate of visit have slowed down from 4 visitors per minute to 1 visitor every minute.
  
  But I am not sure if the rate will increase again.
  
  And hopefully, it will really stop soon.
  
  Frankly speaking, I do not know what they will really gain by doing this kind of attack but it is kind of irritating.
  
  Maybe I am slightly too paranoid maybe because this is the first time I have to deal with this situation but the fact is this is eating up my bandwidth.
  
  And to think that my webhosting company cannot even provide me a decent suggestion.
  
  Thanks
  
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Ian Varnava 13 years ago

Don't worry about it man. Enjoy the fake traffic, it'll taper off at some point and then you can use it as motivation to really get that type of traffic to your website.
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Twailer 13 years ago

Am glad you are sorted but you really need to get a reliable web hosting company that provides quick and full time support.In case your site gets hacked, they should be able to help you out rather than leaving you to sort yourself.

I work with hostgator and their support is great.
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Jake Gray 13 years ago

If anything, you can set up IPtables to block those ip ranges.

Or if you are unaware of doing this yourself, hire a 3rd party
solution. Instead of getting a solution, simply get a DDOS protected
server from Sharktech.

Ask for Tim.
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- tenspider 13 years ago
  
  allanlim,
  
  Are you able to obtain the user agent string(s) of the attacker(s) from your access log, or do these keep changing as well as the IPs? It could be a blog comment spammer running a zombie network, or perhaps a blog email spammer. If you're seeing junk comments with embedded links in your blog (especially if they're for online pharmacy products), it's a blog comment spammer (very nasty). If you see lots of new email addresses added to your blog (with junk aliases), it's a blog email spammer (also nasty).
  
  I'd be interested in knowing whether the user agent string is always the same or whether it changes. Also, as queried above by another member, is each IP address completely different or do just the end portions change (i.e., are all IPs within a single IP address range, say, nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn, where only the last one or two "nnn" blocks change)?
  
  If you are able, let me know the specific user agent string(s) as well as a small group of IP addresses. I'll try to verify these against my database.
  
  :confused:
  
  Thanks
  
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JavierElenes 13 years ago

DODprotect.com does a good job at it.
or move to softlayer.com they handle DDOD immediately for you.
another options is cloudflare.com not precisly a ddos protection but it does it as a byproduct of its service
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jminkler 13 years ago

You could combine the referer (the bing keyword) with ip country of origin maybe? But fact is they will still count as "traffic" to the site, but at least wont use up resources.
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