Re: Automated website "fetch" programs

Call the local FBI office and report the denial of service portion 
and theft of data by automated means.  Give them any and all names. 
Hacking and data theft is investigated by the FBI and they do have 
data experts that will look at logs all over the Internet for the 
Denial of Service path.

It is no fun being investigated or even called by the FBI.

The FBI will probably give you an e-mail address to send the logs to.

Add a Firewall that doesn't throttle performance but stops too many 
repeated hits from one IP address.

At 10:32 AM -0400 9/11/02, Mike Taylor wrote:
>We discovered in our logs that a few of our software-developer customers had
>developed their own application that automatically fetches information from
>our website, pounding a specific page of information about 3 times per
>second for about 15-20 minutes straight, querying data to be placed in their
>own database.
>
>When I confronted one of the users directly, he openly admitted that he was
>doing this and that he had developed the application.
>
>I see this as almost a denial of service attack or analogous to phone
>phreaking one of those "10th caller wins" radio contests:  he's purposely
>locking up our service while other legitimate visitors are potentially
>prevented from accessing.
>
>Now, I realize that since this is a freely accessible website, anyone is
>open to PHYSICALLY visit the page.  But I have a problem with someone
>running some sort of automated job to grab data from a site at a clip if it
>affects the performance for other users.
>
>Has anyone run into this situation before, and what steps did you take to
>prevent it, if any?  I'm thinking we may have to resort to keeping a
>database of who accesses our site second-by second and then sending them to
>an error page if they access the site more than 500 times a minute, for
>example.  My fear, however, is that such an action itself would prevent
>legitimate visitors.


-- 
Sincerely,
Kid Stevens

"I need nothing more than a good woman, a good Harley(optional),
good music and good children for the good of my soul."

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