Blocking a distributed, consistent spam attack? Could it be something more serious?
- by mattmcmanus
I will do my best to try and explain this as it's strange and confusing to me. I posted a little while ago about a sustained spike in mysql queries on a VPS I had recently setup. It turned out to be a single post on a site I was developmenting. The post had over 30,000 spam comments! Since the site was one I was slowly building I hadn't configured the anti-spam comment software yet.
I've since deleted the particular post which has given the server a break but the post's url keeps on getting hit. The frustrating thing is every hit is from a different IP. How do I even start to block/prevent this? Is this even something I need to worry about?
Here are some more specific details about my setup, just to give some context:
Ubuntu 8.10 server with ufw setup
The site I'm building is in Drupal which now has Mollom setup for spam control. It wasn't configured before.
The requests happen inconsistently. Sometimes it's every couple seconds and other times it's a an or so between hits. However it's been going on pretty much constantly like that for over a week.
Here is a sample of my apache access log from the last 15 minutes just for the page in question:
dev.domain-name.com:80 97.87.97.169 - - [28/Mar/2010:06:47:40 +0000] "POST http://dev.domain-name.com/comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.1" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 202.149.24.193 - - [28/Mar/2010:06:50:37 +0000] "POST /comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.1" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 193.106.92.77 - - [28/Mar/2010:06:50:39 +0000] "POST /comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.1" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 194.85.136.187 - - [28/Mar/2010:06:52:03 +0000] "POST /comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.1" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 220.255.7.13 - - [28/Mar/2010:06:52:14 +0000] "POST /comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.1" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 195.70.55.151 - - [28/Mar/2010:06:53:41 +0000] "POST /comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.1" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 71.91.4.31 - - [28/Mar/2010:06:56:07 +0000] "POST http://dev.domain-name.com/comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.1" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 98.209.203.170 - - [28/Mar/2010:06:56:10 +0000] "POST http://dev.domain-name.com/comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.1" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 24.255.137.159 - - [28/Mar/2010:06:56:19 +0000] "POST http://dev.domain-name.com/comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.1" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 77.242.20.18 - - [28/Mar/2010:07:00:15 +0000] "POST /comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.1" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 94.75.215.42 - - [28/Mar/2010:07:01:34 +0000] "POST /comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.0" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 89.115.2.128 - - [28/Mar/2010:07:03:20 +0000] "POST /comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.1" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 75.65.230.252 - - [28/Mar/2010:07:05:05 +0000] "POST http://dev.domain-name.com/comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.1" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 206.251.255.61 - - [28/Mar/2010:07:06:46 +0000] "POST /comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.0" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
dev.domain-name.com:80 213.194.120.14 - - [28/Mar/2010:07:07:22 +0000] "POST /comment/reply/3 HTTP/1.1" 404 5895 "http://dev.domain-name.com/blog/2009/11/23/another" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
I understand this is an open ended question, but any help or insight you could give would be much appreciated.