On 24 August we noticed an excessive amount of activity here on the forums - around 30-40 thousand visitor sessions per hour. At one stage, this was generating just over 1 million database requests per minute, which, as you might expect, started causing errors and timeouts when trying to use the forums.
Our analysis indicated that this was an automated bot event using a very large and constantly changing set of IP addresses, which would have made attempting to block the traffic individually almost impossible. More concerning was that the activity wasn't limited to simply viewing forum content. The bots were also showing significant interest in the Admin profile and login pages, as well as attempting to register and post/comment in discussions around the forums.
With this massive amount of questionable automated activity causing the server to become overloaded, and with no particular IP address pattern that could be effectively blocked, we made the decision to take the forums completely offline, leaving only a simple landing page for visitors and automated systems to encounter.
This immediately removed the database-intensive forum activity and allowed the rest of the site, and the forum administration, to continue operating normally. Over the following period the automated activity subsided, and the forums have now been brought back online and are currently operating normally.
We've found no evidence of unauthorized access to the forums, user accounts, or restricted forum data. The attempts to register and post were blocked by the existing forum permissions, and the Admin account was not compromised.While the forums are now mostly inactive, we consider them a valuable historical and information resource for MacGyver fans and as such will continue to maintain them as an archive for the fan community for as long as the legacy software can be kept running.
