[ic] Malicious DDoS attack causing interchange to fail Extent of problem

[davideth at whojamadoogle.com]

Checked the usertrack log that was cleared and restarted 5 Aug 2025 ( 3 
days ago ).


I log VIEWPAGES to usertrack, to see what customers look at but ...

there was 2.2 million lines in 3 days, 99 percent were 1 time accesses 
to pages  VIEWPAGE =  .....  and the pages included pages that are not 
normally accessible.

That is about 700,000 accesses a day ( averaging 480 pages a minute or 8 
pages a second )  while the normal number of visitors is between 20 to 
40 a day.

because of this, it is often 20 seconds up to 2 minutes or longer for a 
page to load for a legitimate user. ( Note also that this is for 1 site 
of 80 on this server )

I sorted the file by IP in a spreadsheet and there was many that only 
accessed 1, 2, or 3 pages in the 3 days period.

First, I would go broke using something like Recaptcha or cloudfare. 
Just can not afford.

Would really appreciate some help and this is important to update in 
interchange because sooner or later this sort of malicious attack might 
happen to other Interchange sites.


David