Fraud?

Why do I get hit every few minutes?

[JudgeJeffries]

I bought a new dotusdotcom name a couple of months ago and hosted it in the US for a US business venture. Within hours of putting the site up and before any SE bots visited I started to be inundated with what appears to be the same visitor hitting the site throughout the day every 5 minutes or so and he has recently been joined by another doing exactly the same thing. The site performs quite normally, and is now well placed but the stats are completely buggered by these recurring mystery visitors. I suspect they are up to no good at my expense somehow. Any one enlighten me and what can I do if only to get some accurate statistics.
Thanks.

[georgeek]

What do they look like in the server logs?

[JudgeJeffries]

Host: 67.86.153.104 Url: / Http Code : 200
Date: Sep 26 13:39:09 Http Version: HTTP/1.1" Size in Bytes: 9269
Referer: - Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)

[georgeek]

Mmmm... are they both from the same IP address if so I would just exclude them for a while.

[JudgeJeffries]

Any idea what they could be up to?

[georgeek]

Impossible to say unless someone here has had a similar experience from the same IP block and even then it might not be the same people. There are a million crazies out there and it's not worth worrying about their motive just ban them and keep an eye open for a repeat performance.

[Filipe]

I bought a domain name once that, apparently, were once owned long ago - my catch-all e-mail address received personal emails from people who apparently new a guy at an address at my domain name (and these actually were not SPAM. I was able to e-mail the people who sent the messages, and they responded with apologies).

On the flipside of the same coin, I was already getting SPAM at that address. My luck, huh?

Finally, related directly to your problem, some bot (I don't have access to the logs as I post this, or I'd look for it) was spidering my site every 2 or 3 days. It was from some small-time SE - probably email/url harvesting.

[jimbeetle]

>>just ban them and keep an eye open for a repeat performance

Cablevision IP, be very careful before you decide to ban it or you might take out a chunk of Long Island.

[georgeek]

Cablevision IP, be very careful before you decide to ban it or you might take out a chunk of Long Island.

You don't have to take out the whole block just the ones they are using. The IP addresses are dynamic (aren't they?) but in practice they shouldn't change too frequently (should be able to tell from the logs) - that's why I said for a while...