Using a plugin accessory along with this WordPress blog; I thought I’d take a look to see who’s been viewing it lately, as I do at random occasionally. I noticed some rather strange anomalous activity: –

Before I radically rebuilt this blog back in November 2010; the permalink-structure was different to how it is today: Rather than the more-SEO-friendly style of having the articles’ publication date and title in the URL as I do now, I used the rather-SEO-hostile-format of kkomp.com/archives/****, with a number identifying the post, here represented by ****.

I’ve changed hosting provider, DNS nameserver, the lot; but some links from other websites, which were posted therein before this change, still reflect the old URL-permalink-structure. It’s not unreasonable to assume, therefore, that some hits on this blog are going to be using an outdated permalink of the old-style structure. – Which, incidentally, go to my 404-page, on which is a brief explanation of the change of URL structure. It might be considered fairly unlikely that more than 3 consecutive hits would use the old URL-structure though. It would be considered extremely unlikely that more than 3 consecutive hits would use not only that old structure, but also exactly the same outdated-URL. It would be considered virtually impossible if, as a matter of chance, that those random consecutive identical hits, using the old URL-structure, were from separate ip addresses located in different countries, all within a minute of one another!

- Which leads me to believe that, in the light of the evidence reproduced below, person or persons unknown, using Internet Explorer 6 and the Windows XP operating system, have, with the help of revolving-ip-spoofer scripts, attempted a small-scale DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attack on this blog’s server: –

46.17.96.75

more info

Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6
wordspress.info
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

September 28, 2011 19:38:28

http://kkomp.com/archives/6017/

58.26.29.222

more info

Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6
58.26.29.222
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

September 28, 2011 19:37:21

/archives/6017/

89.106.13.93

more info

Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6
reverse-89-106-13-93.turkticaret.net
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

September 28, 2011 19:37:03

/archives/6017/

210.107.100.251

more info

Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6
210.107.100.251
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

September 28, 2011 19:36:55

/archives/6017/

62.157.186.18

more info

Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6
62.157.186.18
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

September 28, 2011 19:36:23

/archives/6017/

September 28, 2011 19:36:36

/archives/6017/

September 28, 2011 19:36:42

/archives/6017/

September 28, 2011 19:36:48

/archives/6017/

September 28, 2011 19:38:25

/archives/6017/

61.160.250.169

more info

Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6
61.160.250.169
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

September 28, 2011 19:36:16

/archives/6017/

It’s no biggie and did no harm, I have no idea as to who the culprit or culprits are, and I would imagine that it’s possibly not that much of an unusual occurrence, given the number of sad wannabe-hackers these days. I thought I’d blog about it just as a matter of interest.

Major DDOS attacks, aimed at jamming up the servers of big companies, follow a similar format but on a much larger scale: Imagine a server having to cope with something like 10,000 pings containing 2,400 packets of data, plus 10,000 invalid URL-requests, a second; from a room full of hackers’ computers, all spoofing their ip addresses on a revolving-ip script with every DNS-lookup bounced off any number of servers across the globe. – Too much traffic for an unprotected server to handle all at once, and it goes offline and has some sort of kernel-panic.

(I’m not much of a Linux-geek, despite appearances to the contrary; Windows is more my personal style.)

That kind of situation can be extremely frustrating and damaging to any business; and it is indeed a case of “the bigger they are the harder they fall” in this scenario.

I don’t really want to go into great detail about this subject; but I hope that you at least found this post enlightening in some way, if not informative and educational. – Thanks for reading. If you like you could do me a favour in return and share this post on social-media, or perhaps leave a comment.