Something’s hitting this site 1,000’s of times a month

Any idea how to figure out what it is?

[geoinct]

Trying to figure out an issue with a small site for some months.

The site reports show that the number of user sessions has jumped from the approx 1,000 per month the site has seen for a couple years to 13,000 in August, and 35,000+ every month since. Nothing correlates. If we look at a particular day we see large numbers of sessions, many every hour, but very few referring URLS, very few page views on inner pages, just the home page. Even sessions by net location are a small fraction of the total user sessions.

Unfortunately the site reports are not very good, StatsPlus.The web hosting company doesn’t find anything.

Any idea what could be causing this or how to figure it out? Viruses?

FYI – It’s IIS, not sure what version of windows.

[isitreal]

Yes, we had a problem like that too, if you can look at one of your physical log files you'll probably see repeated requests for the home page, but nothing else, no components of the home page, just requests for '/' the root file, that is.

This is caused by windows viri on other computers, I'm not completely clear on the mechanism. If you had a better hoster, you could turn off logging of windows exploits and those numbers would probably go back to where they were.

If you look at a logfile what you would probably see is repeated requests from something with user agent windows 98 running IE 5.x, with a different ip address for each request, but all requests only for the root / file.