Another botnet spamming Drupal web sites, causing performance issues

We previously wrote in detail about how botnets hammering a web site can cause outages.

Here is another case that emerged in the past month or so.

Again, it is a distributed attempt from many IP addresses all over the world, most probably from PCs infected with malware.

Their main goal seems to be to add content to a Drupal web site, and trying to register a new user when that attempt is denied because of site permissions.

The pattern is like the following excerpt from the web server's access log.

Botnet hammering web site causing outages

We had a site for a client that was stable for close to two years, then suddenly started to experience switches from the master to the geographically separate slave server as frequently as twice a week.

The site is an entertainment news site, and its articles get to Google News on occasions.

The symptoms was increased load on the server, a sudden influx of traffic causing over 800 simultaneous connections all in the ESTABLISHED state.

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