vB 4.2 site hijacked by spam bots

[The Rocketeer]

Hello,


our host recently contacted us about unnatural high cpu usages for which he had to disable our site. it turns out our site was attacked like many others by some automated spam bot which seems to hijack and start making posts every few mins jamming the server resources. now I am unable to even login to the admin cp to turn the board off

the host has turned the site to only being able to view it from my IP address. otherwise the bot starts jaming their CPU.

can anybody help me, the site is a semi active site for archive purposes and I do not have any site technicians to look at it and I have limited knowledge of vbulletin and coding

[The Rocketeer]

problem may be similar to this, can anybody help?

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=257848

[Wayne Luke]

This is what is called a DDOS attack. These types of attacks need to be handled by your host at the router level. Even if you banned their IP addresses in the software, they would still use up your resources and nothing will be solved. Most hosting providers have contingency plans for DDOS attacks against their customers. The better ones have routers that are self-learning and mitigate such attacks before they happen.

To prevent bots from registering on your site and posting you will need to enable spam management tools and a human verification system or install an addon like Glowhost Anti-spam.

[The Rocketeer]

Are you sure because my host (HAWKHOST) which is a pretty reputable company suggested its most likely a Bot, not a DDOS. The Bot may have injected some query due to out dated vbulletin version, and now every time the forum is turned on its sending its spam using up the server resources.

Also how do I go about cleaning the 13GB database the spamer has created?

[beishe8]

Are you sure because my host (HAWKHOST) which is a pretty reputable company suggested its most likely a Bot, not a DDOS. The Bot may have injected some query due to out dated vbulletin version, and now every time the forum is turned on its sending its spam using up the server resources.

Bots usually don't inject anything.
Your forum is behaving like a bot after someone injected some code to your site.