Over the past 24 hours both of my blogs have seen huge spikes in hits. All the hits have happened within a few minutes of one another, and they have all come from Russia. I don't know whether to be concerned about this or not. I happened to notice the anomaly right after it occurred on my film blog. I locked the site down so nobody could access it, but I am not sure what good that did. I have since opened it back up.
I checked this blog when I got up and had the same thing happen at 2am this morning, but to a lesser extent. I have to assume these are not "real" hits. It is somehow a spammer fishing for something. I am not sure what. Everything from blogger is hosted on google servers, so I trust their security is adequate and whatever robot was poking around wasn't able to get anything. That is a big assumption I guess.
I've searched for similar circumstances happening to others with blogger, and found several. It seems like it is not uncommon for random far-flung countries to assault blogger sites with a ton of hits in a short amount of time. Surely this isn't limited to blogger. It probably happens with any platform.
Blogger friends, have you checked your stats and seen anything like this happening? In addition to the built-in blogger stats I use another traffic tracking service. That isn't nearly as real-time, so I haven't seen all these Russian hits register on there yet. Once they do I should be able to find out more about it. I'm not sure whether to be worried or just annoyed. It makes me want to lock my sites so only approved visitors can access them. That is inconvenient for everybody though.
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This morning google posted an update to their official gmail blog. As much as I use google services I will definitely be taking advantage and add another layer of security to my account. Thanks google. You at least make me feel better about handing my life over to you.
