Attack of the Dutchbots

Rox.com has been offline for most of the past week. We were shut down by our host because of an unwarranted consumption of resources which was destabilizing our shared server.

They seemed to feel the culprit was a gnarly database query coming from the scripts that power this site. This might seem plausible since said scripts were hand-coded by Editor B, who knows just enough to be dangerous. However, the query in question has been running ever since we moved to DreamHost five years ago, without incident.

Upon examining our access logs, it was evident that rox.com was getting a barrage of visits from a handful of IP addresses in the Netherlands. These were presumably some sort of bot, possibly malicious.

We blocked these IP addresses. The attack seems to have subsided. Perhaps the Dutch bots got bored.

Anyhow, rox.com is back online. Did you miss us?

— posted by B on February 18th, 2014