vBulletin database errors caused by foreign IP addresses

[jdelasko]

INSERT IGNORE INTO vbsession
(sessionhash, userid, host, idhash, lastactivity, location, styleid, languageid, loggedin, inforum, inthread, incalendar, badlocation, useragent, bypass, profileupdate)
VALUES
('97b54255fd2b947dea29d05615a3e756', 0, '189.19.74.214', '517585b3b2f212d51c31145e433b3e4e', 1218118635, '/forums/index.php', 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Update a; AOL 6.0; Windows 98)', 0, 0);

MySQL Error : MySQL server has gone away
Error Number : 2006
Date : Thursday, August 7th 2008 @ 09:17:50 AM
Script : http://www.majorleaguetalk.com/forums/index.php
Referrer : http://www.majorleaguetalk.com/forums/index.php
IP Address : 189.19.74.214
Username : Unregistered
Classname : vB_Database

I've been geting a lot of alerts similar to the one above lately. The IP addresses listed are from places like China, Korea, Russia, etc. I have never received an alert like this with an IP address that belongs to a registered user.

Can anyone tell me if this error may be due to some sort of hacking attempt? I'm getting several of these every day and it's getting a little annoying. My vB version is 3.6.4

I've been begging my hosting company to install GeoIP so I can easily block the entire other side of the planet, but that hasn't happened yet.

I don't know enough about mySQL to decipher the above error alert. Can somebody please explain to me why this may be occurring?