Advice On A Hacker!

[TOMC28]

Hello.

Daily...as I am getting these false names from ASIA, I've been just banning their IP addresses. They usually stop bugging me.

But just recently I've had what seems to be ONE PERSON consistantly on my site as a GUEST continually trying different things. And today he was on the site under three different very similar IP Addresses. He is from the Mountain View, CA area. Some of these areas which my "WHO'S ONLINE" function is displaying he is in...are areas I don't believe he has access?

Can any of you help me on this? How can I stop this person, and what do you believe he is up to? Can he actually be Modifying his PASSWORD? How can he even have a password when I have his IP addresses BLOCKED?

Thanks again for your support!

[Swampfox]

Those are Googlebots

[Lynne]

It's a googlebot.

[TOMC28]

Ok...dumb question, but what does that mean?

Meaning....people are searching on Google, and they land within my forum? And why would they constantly be from the same Mountain View, CA area?

[Darkslayer2014]

Those are Googlebots

Pretty much he is right. Nothing to worry about. I seem to see that now on my forums. lol

[Lynne]

Ok...dumb question, but what does that mean?

Meaning....people are searching on Google, and they land within my forum? And why would they constantly be from the same Mountain View, CA area?
They are spiders. They are responsible for getting you listed on the google search engine.

And, uh... google is right here in Mountain View. :)

[Swampfox]

<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlebot" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlebot</a>

[steve3402000]

Yep bots are your friend

I am listed #1 on google under forums of my type, out of 350,000 total

they used to irk me, now I love them LOL

steve

[TOMC28]

Ok:-) I shouldn't BAN that IP address then :-)

But....should I be concerned that people from this IP address are trying to change Passwords and they are "unregistered"? I will assume answer is no because they are "unregistered"?

thanks again!

[Marco van Herwaarden]

A spider will just follow all links on pages it finds. So if you have a "change password" link, they will try it (but fail ofcourse).

[Medtech]

shucks... sometimes i get 6 to 7 pages of those spiders! nothing to worry about, infact i wish i had more of them!

[robbiefritz]

good info thanks, can the also cause server overloads?

[punchbowl]

open notepad and paste the following in, then save as robots.txt and upload to your domain root (add whatever the link is to the change password too if you want):

User-agent: Fasterfox
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/ajax.php
Disallow: /forum/attachment.php
Disallow: /forum/calendar.php
Disallow: /forum/cron.php
Disallow: /forum/editpost.php
Disallow: /forum/global.php
Disallow: /forum/image.php
Disallow: /forum/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forum/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forum/login.php
Disallow: /forum/member.php
Disallow: /forum/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forum/misc.php
Disallow: /forum/moderator.php
Disallow: /forum/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forum/newreply.php
Disallow: /forum/newthread.php
Disallow: /forum/online.php
Disallow: /forum/poll.php
Disallow: /forum/postings.php
Disallow: /forum/printthread.php
Disallow: /forum/private.php
Disallow: /forum/profile.php
Disallow: /forum/register.php
Disallow: /forum/report.php
Disallow: /forum/reputation.php
Disallow: /forum/search.php
Disallow: /forum/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forum/showgroups.php
Disallow: /forum/subscription.php
Disallow: /forum/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forum/usercp.php
Disallow: /forum/usernote.php