Waiting for images

J

jdeg

^ broke something
Staff member
Alright, I think I fixed it for good this time. I found that bots were attacking a specific script on the server that isn't commonly used. Disabled the script and the extra load is gone :)
 
cwgrizz

cwgrizz

Senior Member
Challenge Team
I haven't checked it much this morning, but haven't yet noticed any delays. Thanks @jdeg for your continued work on this. It is really appreciated!
 
W

wornish

Senior Member
Just had a look on wikipedia there are lots of bad bots out there.

Commercial purposes[edit]

There has been a great deal of controversy about the use of bots in an automated trading function. Auction website eBay has been to court in an attempt to suppress a third-party company from using bots to traverse their site looking for bargains; this approach backfired on eBay and attracted the attention of further bots. The United Kingdom-based bet exchange Betfair saw such a large amount of traffic coming from bots they launched a WebService API aimed at bot programmers through which Betfair can actively manage bot interactions.
Bot farms are known to be used in online app stores, like the Apple App Store and Google Play, to manipulate positions[SUP][1][/SUP] or to increase positive ratings/reviews.[SUP][2]
[/SUP]

Malicious purposes[edit]

Another, more malicious use of bots is the coordination and operation of an automated attack on networked computers, such as a denial-of-service attack by a botnet. Internet bots can also be used to commit click fraud and more recently have seen usage around MMORPG games as computer game bots. A spambot is an internet bot that attempts to spam large amounts of content on the Internet, usually adding advertising links.

  • There are malicious bots (and botnets) of the following types:

  1. Spambots that harvest email addresses from contact or guestbook pages
  2. Downloader programs that suck bandwidth by downloading entire web sites
  3. Website scrapers that grab the content of websites and re-use it without permission on automatically generated doorway pages
  4. Viruses and worms
  5. DDoS attacks
  6. Botnets, zombie computers, etc.

  • Bots are also used to buy up good seats for concerts, particularly by ticket brokers who resell the tickets. Bots are employed against entertainment event-ticketing sites. The bots are used by ticket brokers to unfairly obtain the best seats for themselves while depriving the general public from also having a chance to obtain the good seats. The bot runs through the purchase process and obtains better seats by pulling as many seats back as it can.
  • Bots are often used in Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games to farm for resources that would otherwise take significant time or effort to obtain; this is a concern for most online in-game economies.
  • Bots are also used to increase views for YouTube videos.
  • Bots are used to increase traffic counts on analytics reporting to extract money from advertisers. A study by comScore found that 54 percent of display ads shown in thousands of campaigns between May 2012 and February 2013 never appeared in front of a human being.[SUP][3][/SUP]
  • in 2012 reporter Percy Lipinski reported that he discovered millions of bot or botted or pinged views at CNN iReport. CNN iReport quietly removed millions of views from the account of so-called superstar iReporter Chris Morrow. A follow-up investigation lead to a story published on the citizen journalist platform, Allvoices: http://www.allvoices.com/contribute...er-view-scandal-millions-of-page-view-removed. It is not known if the ad revenue received by CNN from the fake views was ever returned to the advertisers.
The most widely used anti-bot technique is the use of CAPTCHA, which is a form of Turing test used to distinguish between a human user and a less-sophisticated AI-powered bot, by the use of graphically encoded human-readable text. Examples of providers include Recaptcha, and commercial companies such as Minteye, Solve Media and NuCaptcha. Captchas, however, are not foolproof in preventing bots as they can often be circumvented by computer character recognition, security holes, and even by outsourcing captcha solving to cheap laborers.
 
J

jdeg

^ broke something
Staff member
In our case it was malicious bots looking for holes in software. Basically brute forcing, which causes extra load/connections to the server.
 
Marcel

Marcel

Happily retired
Staff member
Super Mod
Well Thanks John. I'm glad you found it before it was too late and the whole site was compromised. Hope these things don't happen too often.
 
J

jdeg

^ broke something
Staff member
Sorry guys, should be back to normal now. If anything, faster than before. Installed some new software too.
 
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