Hi, I've been having this really strange problem with my site recently and i don't know what to do. See, for the past 2 weeks ive been getting these strange requests in my cPanel error log saying that a page hasn't been found. Well, normally it wouldn't be a problem but these requests occur one after the other, several times a second...

It's usually a direct request for an error page by either just one or several like IP addresses and now they're looking for scripts like email.cgi, sender.pl, feedback.pl along with a lot of others. I know this has been used to send spam via someone's website before... just why mine? I think the person is using a proxy of some sort and it's really making me angry. I've tried blocking IP's but the next day i get a whole page of the same errors from another IP.

Just why are people doing this to my site? And how do i stop them? I've been working on my website for so long and i dont want it to die because of some jerk script-kiddie thinking theyre smart by using a program to do theyre work.

Java Dude,

I'm not sure how I can explain why someone is doing this. As you said, the internet is full of people whose behavior is beyond explanation.

Are you being hosted by a provider? If so, you could contact them and tell them the problem you're having and see if they have any ideas to help you.

If not, if you manage this server yourself, you could write a script which pulls out the IP of the request from the server variables. You'll have to write some code to see if you get more than n requests from the same IP within a fixed timeframe -- but that will not bother normal visitors. For example, if this guy is making 5-10 requests a second or even one a second, that is soemthing you could use against him. It will take some heavy lifting on your part, but that's the only thing that comes to mind.

Hopefully some other posters will have some different ideas...

Hey, thx for your reply. Well, I'm being hosted by another company and when i told them what's been going on they said they can't do anything to help me out, and that the only thing I can do is block this person's IP. Which doesn't really help since these are most likely fake IP's.

someone suggested to "turn mailing from scripts off in cPanel.." is there a way to do that without disabling the script altogether, so that people can still submit stuff to me from my site? thx for any help!