A Weblog of Centrist Voices in American Politics
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A Weblog of Centrist Voices in American Politics | |
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March 21, 2006Attack On The Blog?We received a complaint from our host that the blog used an excessive amount of system resources on Wed 03/15/2006 at around 3PM ET. I know it was not due to the periodic maintenance I do on the blog to remove spam and rebuild it, because I have an "alibi" for the Ides of March. The host says the process that was using resources was a large number of threads of mt-tb.cgi running in parallel. This sounds like trackback spam gone wild. I periodically close our trackbacks except for the last 5 days or so, so I don't think the trackback pings are succeeding, but they may be taking resources. The user activity log shows nothing unusual for that period. Any idea of what's going on? I don't think we're prominent or offensive enough to generate a DoS attack. The coindence of comments and trackback execution going down last Friday could be related. Someone changed their permissions not to execute. It could have been someone at the host who did it to stop excessive instances of execution, though they didn't inform us of it. Posted by Rick Heller at March 21, 2006 10:36 AMComments
I've also disabled trackbacks. We don't get many of them, and it seems to be the target of attack. If anyone want's to bring our attention to a link they've made to a post of ours, email me a note at cf at centrist coalition dot com Posted by: Rick Heller at March 21, 2006 11:12 AMBoth Marginal Revolution and Brad DeLong have chosen to shut down trackbacks recently due to spam and the trouble they cause. That definitely could be the problem and you may not be getting enough benefit out of trackbacks to matter anyway. Also, I've noticed several times (though I don't remember specifically that day) that rpc.blogrolling .com is a serious hog when the page loads. Not sure if that would have anything to do with it though. My overvalued two cents would be to just shut down trackbacks and see if that helps. Posted by: Scotch Drinker at March 21, 2006 11:41 AMOur generic traffic stats didn't indicate any major traffic surge. Indeed, that Wednesday was "quieter" than normal, and last week was our slowest traffic week in months. A real DoS attack would probably hit the comments, or just straightup page loads. 3 pm ET would be our peak daily traffic time, and it's also "peak" for overall US web traffic loads. Possibility: It could have been my Djibouti posting. That linked a Speigel story that itself had an embedded Technorati "check for blogs that mention this story" link. If a lot of people poked the Speigel/Technorati "check" link, it could have REALLY boosted the number of Technorati trackback searches. If our host had a slow-load moment, that could stack up fast, as it was a world-wide story cross-linked by Drudge. That story got a LOT of worldwide circulation, all through the single Speigel link with the embedded Technorati button. Just a possibility. A real DoS would've shown up in other ways in the stats, I think. Posted by: Tully at March 21, 2006 11:42 AMPossibly a virus that attacks Movable Type? I know that one of our web servers has been getting hammered recently by a virus that attempts to get into the server via a weakness in PHP, with the net result that, although the attack failed, even in failure it tied up enough resources to lock up the web server. Maybe there's something similar for Movable Type on the horizon. Posted by: Simon at March 21, 2006 01:46 PM |
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