Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Was my forum hacked?

[bisrock]

I am not sure if i am posting this on the right board and if i can get help here regarding my problem.

Somebody tried to do something stupid in my forum few hours ago. I guess it was somebody who i banned from accessing my forum.
The average number of online members that my forum has is 7 members at the same time, maximum is 10. I was shocked then i checked on the number of online users, it showed 15 guests and 3 users (which is me and 2 other friends).. After 5 minutes, i check again and it showed 40 guests already so i'm starting to feel that something stupid is happening. I checked on it every 5 minutes and the increase of the number of guests was amazingly increasing so fast, viewing different boards on my forum. After 20-30 minutes, the number of guests my forum has was already 438 so i immediately set it not to allow guests to browse the forum because i was concerned it's gonna eat up a lot of bandwidth.

I am not a computer guru to start with, in fact i'm an idiot when it comes to this stuff. I have a feeling that person whom i banned is trying to get back at me and wants to destroy my forum.

Any advice on what i should do to prevent it from happening again? As much as possible i don't want to restrict my forum to member's alone. I also want non-members to be able to browse the forum..

Thanks.

[Benji - ASM]

Maybe your site has been digged or slashdotted????

Benji

[bisrock]

Originally Posted by CARSRTHEWORLD

Maybe your site has been digged or slashdotted????

Benji

I'm sorry but i don't know what that means..

[clefren]

Originally Posted by bisrock

I'm sorry but i don't know what that means..

It means having your url posted on very popular sites like digg.com and slashdot.com. From what you've posted I don't think that's your problem.

[bisrock]

by the way, i was able to save the IP's of those guests and they were close to each other..

[Jame$]

Sometimes you could be hit by search engine spiders like this, check your BW usages.

[bear]

If the IPs were close I'd check who owns them. Might be Google or Yahoo came looking, and you just shut the door on 'em.

[MailShield]

These were most likely spiders which crawl your site and rank your forum posts in google etc.

They normally dont stick around long and should of subscided within 5 minutes

If this does not happen then i would suggest running a whois on those ip's to see where they belong to. try www.dnsstuff.com

Regards
Shaun

[besty]

untill, you are running the latest forum version you are free from some security vulnerabilities. So you are quite safe from hacker and also your problem doesn't resembles hack. As some of the members sugested check the whois information...