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I have a website. Somebody is sending thousands of 404 hits to my site. He uses random IPs. he is keep on sending at least 1000+ hits everyday to various urls which doesn't exists in my site. I have been getting thousands of 404 hits every day. Kindly guide me on how to handle this issue.

if you have any questions, let me know.

Thanks

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Voting to migrate to ServerFault. – Oded Dec 14 '11 at 10:44
What are these URLs he's hitting? Don't need the domain, just the path (e.g., http:// www.domain.com/ path) – derobert Dec 14 '11 at 11:21
there are several patterns. some of them are /admin/login.php, /wp-content/themes/<some_theme_name>/timthumb.php and he is is passing some arguments to these php files. – John Dec 14 '11 at 15:53
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Dec 14 '11 at 11:20

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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

Is it actually affecting the performance of your website? If it's just an annoyance in the logs, install fail2ban and configure it so that after X bad requests the IP is automatically banned. Soon you'll have a number of IP's banned and blocked.

If it's actually affecting your bandwidth talk to your provider about blocking out particular sites. You need to decide if it's worth blocking regions or just trying to limit certain kinds of requests; assuming you have a business account (which you should for hosting) they will need to block it farther upstream in order to prevent your connection from getting overwhelmed.

You can also google for methods of automating firewall rules to block sites, but that won't help your bandwidth if that's an issue, since the requests still make it to your server.

I'd suggest you make sure you triple check that the latest updates are in place for Wordpress. It's like a magnet for hacks.

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I use shared webhosting. The hacker is not trying to login. he is just trying to access some scripts in my site which I do not have. So, I am getting 404 hits. – John Dec 14 '11 at 15:56
Then either ignore it or use fail2ban. Sounds like they're probing for Wordpress vulnerabilities. – Bart Silverstrim Dec 14 '11 at 16:07
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up vote 1 down vote

Ignore it. Your webserver sending a 404 is not a problem. 1000s of times a day are not many. Unless this is causing some secondary problem, just ignore it and move on.

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okay. thanks. I worried little about lot of 404 errors. will it affect my site in any way like ranking positions in google, etc.? – John Dec 14 '11 at 15:57
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Is googlebot getting 404s? you should be able to tell which hits are googlebot by the ip address and the user agent. – stew Dec 14 '11 at 16:02
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