Blekko Bot Plus Spam Equals DDOS Attack

<p>Checked your website's access logs lately?</p>

<p>Like a lot of people using a Register.com nameserver, my website's address has been bogged down with a DDOS Attack on and off for the past two days. In the middle of the access logs for my website, buried in a cloud of IP addresses associated with "comment spammers," was the spider for Blekko.</p>

<p>Look for "scoutjet."</p>

<p>Blekko is a "crowdsourced" ratings system with its search engine. It went online on November 1. Less than two weeks later, it looks like the crowd may be part of this big group of people stomping down the nameserver with a DDOS Attack.</p>

<p>There's a $23 Million dollar war chest behind the thing. They're from Silicon Valley, and these guys could run a spider better.</p>

<p>I mention all of this because the URLs they were trying to get out of my website were 18 months old, but for PDFs and JPEGs, almost exclusively. I got over because the website's since been updated; they didn't get my stuff; but, they repeatedly war-dialed the URLs for the pictures and content.</p>

<p>So, check your access logs if you've got photos tied up with that DDOS over at Register.com. You can probably still get into your files through the service entrance. Don't forget to set your permissions back low again on your way out.</p>

<p>http://agxphoto.blogspot.com/2010/11/switchover-to-agxphotoblogspotcom-in.html<br /> http://www.scoutjet.com/<br /> http://www.mwd.com/2010/11/bleko-launches-human-filtered-search-engine/<br /> Reference on Spiders and Bots: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596005771 (Check your local library.)<br /> Crash course in slapping a password on the directory in Apache: http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/ssl-example-usage-in-htaccess.html and related like http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/security-with-htaccess.html#m0-askapache0</p>