Lots of guests today...
 

:shrug01:

Any indication that this is an attack of some sort, e.g. DNS?

I'm not really sure. Hasn't impacted the server stats much at all. The guys taking care of my server are top notch at hardening servers against intrusions, so I don't worry much about that any more.

Looks like most of the guests were trying to view the profiles of all the members. But of course, they are blocked from doing that by the way I have the permissions set up.

So likely maybe some "google wannabe" new site hasn't fine tuned their spider searching algorithm yet.

But it sure does screw up the statistics trying to figure out what the TRUE number of visiting guests is to this site on any given day.

But wait! There's more!

Just did a spot check of the IP addresses of some "guests" and nearly all of them are originating out of China.

Nice that the folks in China have taken such an interest in the membership here. :hehe:

Several loading stats are rather modest, so this doesn't seem to be having any notable effect on the server's functioning. But if it does get to that, I found a site a while back (hopefully I can find it again if need be) that gave a list of ALL IP addresses in China in a format to plug into the server's WHM panel to ban them all at the door.

I have/manage multiple dedicated servers in different data centers around the US. Some of them are running WHM.

In WHM:
1. On left under Plugins > ConfigServer Security & Firewall
2. Under the "csf - ConfigServer Firewall" section > Firewall Configuration
Look for the section called "Country Code Lists and Settings"
In teh "CC_DENY =" field place the country code. Multiple can be separated by comma. China is CN. Here is a list of all codes for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

3. Scroll to the bottom of the Firewall Configuration page and click on the Change
4. When the page refreshes, click Restart csf+lfd button to restart CSF with new settings.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you! That tip is pretty handy to have available. Never noticed it in WHM before, as the last time I looked into something like that I had to key in every IP address related to the country to be blocked.

Ha. Yeah manual IP entry gets old super quick.

Looks like we are getting a flood again...

BTW, I did look into the WHM option to deny IP addresses based on country codes, and I noticed this warning:
Based on the huge number of IP addresses likely involved, this does not appear to be a feasible plan to implement, unfortunately. Unless I am being overly cautious, of course.