I noticed yesterday that my site was painfully slow, and my server was thrashing like nobody’s business. My access logs suggest that my site has been crawled incessantly by online casinos and other various forms of lowlife, and that it’s been happening for some time.
Hopefully that’s over now.I found that just bouncing Apache helped. The disk thrashing stopped, and when I waited a few seconds before restarting, the thrashing didn’t start back up again. So whatever was hammering me gave up in the interim when the data stopped flowing.
But in the meantime I did some changes to my .htaccess file. The always helpful Dive into Mark gave me a good starting point.
I’m sure that I broke lots of legitimate use of my site in the process, but if that’s the price I have to pay to keep evil people from abusing my computer and DSL line, then so be it. Since I pay the bills, I get to make the rules.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
It’s astounding how the spammers will beat against any website they find. A blogging friend got shut down by her ISP because she ran MoveableType and was getting spammed to death. I get ridiculous spam messages on my Zonk!board. Comment spam is out of control and even trackbacks and referrer lists get spammed. Knowing how bad the zombie botnets are, it’s a wonder anything gets through. I guess you’ve been following what’s happened to BlueSecurity this past week?