October 22, 2008

Data mining

Recently, data mining from several sources has been directed at the iPAC server. The first target was Gilford Public Library’s catalog. The result of this effort was that Gilford’s iPAC was brought to its knees. As a result of this problem, SirsiDynix has given me a range of IP addresses to have blocked. There are three possible miners working in the server. They have trusted names like Google, msn, and slurp. Slurp is apparently part of Yahoo. Although there are legitimate reasons why those search engines would be looking at New Hampshire catalogs, the result of the thousands of searches executed by these bots is equivalent to a denial of service attack. The ranges of IPs being blocked are rather large. If you know anything about IP address formats you can see that there are thousands of potential addresses being block. They are:
Google bot: 66.249.64.0 66.249.95.255
MSN bot: 66.55.0.0 66.55.255.255
Yahoo Slurp! bot: 67.195.0.0 67.195.71.137.

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