Guest flood!

[Tony]

Around 10:30 this evening my co-admin messaged that we were being flooded, and was he ever right. Our small vbulletin forum logged a whopping (for us) 286 Guests at 10:30pm est. We're on shared hosting and rarely have more than 10 members online simultaneously.

We've seen this before, and we've been watching closely since we were suspended a couple months back. Finally this time I was able to look at this myself and it's most odd.

• All the guests were from different IPs around the planet - many different countries.
• Few if any of them were looking at the same thing.
• Closing the forum for a minute didn't stop them.

A little while later things are back to normal - 7 members and 16 Guests. WTF? Does anyone have any idea what could be happening and how am I supposed to curb something like this?

[Anna M.]

You can also submit a ticket to our technical department at whbsupport.com, they will investigate the issue.

[Tony]

I looked in AWstats and found a referrer - http://feed.mikle.com/feeds/rssmikle.cgi - that had some 5600 pages last month, the next highest was Facebook with about 360!

I have no idea what those guys are up to, but since ours is a local forum I just found their Korean host and added that entire range to my IP Deny list.

[Alan B]

It may have been an automated attempt to spam the forum or to look for common vulnerabilities to exploit.