The Climate Conversation web site has been under determined attack by cyber criminals over the last two months. Over 5.5 million web requests and 1.3 million spam messages deluged the server during September and October. I wondered at the persistently slow responses and recently complained. My web host provider was already diagnosing the problem and yesterday brought the attacks to an end, though at the cost of isolating China. Sorry, China!
Our web traffic, already busy, had soared to three times normal, 80% to 90% of it from China, enormously inflating our log files. The SysAdmin told me:
Your logs have been much larger than normal for months, but only caused the server to stop all processing in the last few weeks. Your logs haven’t processed for over a month but others on the server only stopped when yours hung for a week.
Oops. But all fixed now—although for the immediate future nobody from China can see my site. Hopefully the block can be removed when all the little hackers give up and try their luck elsewhere.
The result is a much faster site and a lot less administration for me in eliminating spam messages from the database and watching we don’t run out of disk space.
It’s a nasty modern problem which in the end might well bring down the internet. The proper solution would be for me to track down each of the thousands of suspicious IP addresses (we have them all in the logs), write to their ISPs (all available online) to complain about suspicious activity and wait for the ISPs to take action against them. But weeks of work for no certain result, with the Chinese not caring too much about an obscure foreigner’s web site woes, causes a little pessimism.
I have more productive things to do and if the Chinese can’t visit my site they can still write to me any time they like and request an exemption to the block. I usually respond to polite requests.
Visits: 45
The Chinese have about 30,000 internet police, and they block Twitter and Facebook.
This Is probably why they are so productive.
I missed your comment, Andy. How droll! Certainly, I can report that spam to the blog has dropped by over 90%. Other traffic is down too, but not so much, perhaps 30%.