[Johannes]

Noticed this yesterday and thought it was odd (it has been nonstop for over 48 hours):



Now I am seeing the same in the Bishop Williamson  thread...


Forum may be affected by malware:
29 signs that a website has been hacked (What to do next?)

"Sudden spikes or drops in traffic could be a sign of malware on your website. Malware can redirect traffic to other sites or create fake traffic to make it appear as though your site is receiving more traffic than it actually is. Look for telltale signs like sudden spikes in traffic from a single location or a significant increase in bounce rates."

Maybe everything is fine - just seems odd...

[Ladislaus]

Good Catch.  I think there's something definitely going on here.  I looked now and there are 1965 Guests overall, which perhaps I initially attributed to news about Bishop Williamson, but then it shows 2517 as the record ON January 05 (with not much going on really).  Now, these web crawlers are all over the place indexing stuff for search engines, but that appears to be way too many at one time, even if they're running multi-threaded to speed things up ... they wouldn't send 1900 of them to one site like CathInfo.

Matthew, you might want to have a look to see who these thousands of "Guest" users are.

• 1956 Guests
• 21 Users

Users active in past 15 minutes: Ladislaus, Archkanzler, MaterDominici, Seraphina, mom8, Against the Heresies, Miseremini, Mirari Vos, ByzCat3000, DustyActual, nonpossumus, Persto, laststand, Clare67, FarmerWife, Coillte7, Yeti, pnw1994, josefamenendez, Mikey, cletus1805
Most Online Today: 2517. Most Online Ever: 2774 (January 05, 2025, 09:42:46 PM)

Perhaps the ADL has received some more funding and is scouring CathInfo for clues about our identities and to determine which of us are "Anti-Shemites" ... so that we can eventually be rounded up.  I could see thousands of bots being needed due to the history on this site.

[Ladislaus]

Perhaps the ADL has received some more funding and is scouring CathInfo for clues about our identities and to determine which of us are "Anti-Shemites" ... so that we can eventually be rounded up.  I could see thousands of bots being needed due to the history on this site.

If that's the case, then, well, it's been nice knowing you, since my true identity and my views on said subject can be mined from CathInfo.

[Twice dyed]

I noticed this morning that a LOT of "guests" were reading +W threads. I was exclaiming to my older brother : Wow, 90 guests are reading about +Williamson  -that's huge for a teeny weeney forum...
Maybe time to have a members only forum...? Glad my email isn't visible. 

[Ladislaus]

Yeah, but something else is going on here, as the record traffic of near 3,000 happened on January 5th, when not much was happening, and it's unlikey that 60-70 users would be hanging out in the "Saint Quotes" thread.  Probably something that should be looked into, whether it's bot traffic, or potentially some nefarious activity afoot.

[St Giles]

Have any of you actually reported this to Matthew? He may be too busy to read this thread.

[Johannes]

Have any of you actually reported this to Matthew? He may be too busy to read this thread.

I just sent him the thread link in a message.

[Matthew]

This is where CathInfo's overpowered server comes in. The specs on that server, to run just one website, are impressive. I have a fiber internet connection as well. That's why, despite the bot traffic, the site hasn't slowed down at all.

The dozen people who donated for the last CathInfo server hardware are getting a continued payoff on their donation/investment

I'm guessing it's another (new?) search engine, or new tactic used by one or more search engines. If I looked over the server logs, I could probably lock it down. Maybe I will. But I have a lot going on in my life besides CathInfo.

[Matthew]

Sure enough, it was a few IP addresses doing a ridiculous amount of bot traffic. I blocked the whole range, and the server load has already dropped to a fraction of what it was.

The server is 24 cores, so the utilization could be as high as 24.0 if all 24 cores were maxed out.
Right now the server is at 0.01. With the huge constant flood of traffic, it was more like 0.24.

Glad CathInfo has a lot of headroom for malicious traffic like this.

Hopefully the "guest count" goes down after 15 minutes.

If they are just hitting CathInfo once per IP address, however, there's no possible way I could filter that out from normal CathInfo traffic.

[Matthew]

I remember years ago, when people were actually talking about him, we suspected TradCatKnight hired some kind of "denial of service" attack on CathInfo, since there was so much criticism of him here at the time. It was a reasonable accusation, since TCK was known and proven to have ventured into the shady and seedy neighborhoods of the Internet to hire such help, from bot farms, fake FB followers, fake Twitter followers, fake Youtube watches and likes, etc. All of that was 100% proven with rock-solid evidence. So if he wasn't above paying money for "things to go his way" on the Internet, plus the fact you CAN pay for a Denial of Service attack... it was quite logical and reasonable to at least suspect he might do such a thing.

Wouldn't it be hilarious if that were the case, and he was doing it again (perhaps because he was brought up again recently) -- only now we barely notice, like a mosquito on an ox?

Not saying it's him, but whoever it is, he will be sorely disappointed in the results. Seriously, the server is responding with a resounding "meh".

[Matthew]

I found a new bot that wasn't being blocked yet -- after running the script, (which goes back retroactively a couple weeks), that resulted in 438 IPs being added to the permanent blacklist.

We'll see if that helps.

[St Giles]

Thanks.

It would be great if you could put sanctions on bots somehow, like limiting their data rate and funneling them into a bottle neck, not like it would matter.

[Dominic]

I wonder if it's the LLM training bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Meta, TikTok, etc. They've been known to scrape the web much more aggressively than the standard search-engine crawlers. 

https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/17342163

[St Giles]

Record number of visitors today

[Giovanni Berto]

3614 Guests
16 Users

This does not look normal to me.