Identifying Threats
This could also represent some form of hacking where you potentially could end up with a compromised site and even a compromised server.
So, how do you identify these types of intrusions and in simple terms how can you deal with them?
The first thing to do is to take a pro-active stance with your website. To put it up there and then forget about it is not recommended especially if there is any form of registration or form process where information needs to be recorded. Think about ways to manage your site so that threats are minimised.
Put in a CAPTCHA field which is an effective method of security that deters robot registrations and stops them from just blanketing your forms with SPAM links. This works because they cannot read images only text and code so it acts as a block which requires human intervention to overcome and this results in automated culling of 99% of any spurious registrations.
Adding a hidden field to the form that is designed to stay blank is another good way of dealing with the robots as they will fill in every field and because they read code will also see the blank field and fill it. When the field is filled the form cannot be submitted and this deters sPAMbots in the same way as the CAPTCHA field.
The above options will provide you with some measure of protection but there are also one or two others that can help you to slowly get your site off the BOTlink merrygoround and this is to watch carefully the visits to your site, the ones you are looking for are generally foreign visits, China, Ukraine, Russia, Estonia many of these countries have insufficient regulation and often sponsor proxy servers and less scrupulous hosting organisations which allow for these types of websites to proliferate the Net.
The next thing is to drill down into these visits which will generally be your home page and registration page, or form page if you are using any forms. In this sense they often go against the normal visitor trend who will often trawl through your site and generally would only go to your registration page after they have decided they like the content. It is easy to identify them this way.
Take a note [or copy to your clipboard] the IP address of each of these and then go to your cPanel and click on the "IP Deny Manager" option and insert the copied IP address into the box, which will also accept the offending domain name if you have it.
Keep adding names or IP addresses over a few weeks until you see the instances dropping off and then you should be able to see an improved speed performance on your site and also more realistic and identifiable visitor statistics that will assist you in your site marketing.
If you have a Joomla site please click on this [link] to provide you with specific instructions on how you could secure your site from within the CMS setup.