PP Blog Experiences Unusual Traffic Pattern
UPDATED 10:03 A.M. ET (JAN. 5, U.S.A.) The PP Blog has experienced an unusual traffic pattern on a couple of occasions today. Like previous strange patterns, “readers” displaying a range of international IPs sought to pull the same story virtually simultaneously. Today’s unusual pattern involved repeated calls to the Blog’s database to load a story that references Zeek Rewards. The call strings were lengthy.
Since November, the Blog has experienced approximately five publishing outages. One appears to have been what the Blog is characterizing as a traffic flood that appears to have originated in Northwest Europe. All five outages required manual intervention for the Blog to resume publishing operations. In addition to the traffic floods, the Blog receives an incredible volume of spam.
In December 2012 alone, at least 38,148 spam messages were directed at the Blog. In November 2012, at least 31,617 spam messages were directed at the Blog.
Today’s unusual traffic pattern appears not to be spam-related and did not affect publishing operations.
Here is a screen shot from one period of today’s unusual pattern.
What you have shown looks like an example of the lengths to which scammers and their followers will go to silence criticism of their scams. You mention that the pages that spammed relate to your coverage of Zeek. What a “coincidence”. If I am not mistaken, the same thing happened a while back when you reported on other specific scams.
Whilst it is a nuisance, it only goes to show that your articles are hitting scammers where it hurts.
Bravo.