Stop PHP hackers??

deep

Hello,

I have noticed that the traffic on my site has increased dramatically the last month but nothing is actually happening on the site... well not as much as expected when it comes to these volumes of traffic.

I read on another forum that someone might try to hack me by using the php engine somehow and ascii characters...

Does anyone know anything of this?? How does it work and how do you stop it?? 😕

Thanks!

dewen

How do you moniter the traffic?

planetsim

Just because your site suddenly becomes popular you cannot claim to have them all hackers or anyone a hacker even if you get 1 visitor per day.

However you should be doing things from the start such as checking all user inputted data with it be from Forms, Cookies, Query Strings they should all be checked as no data from a user can be trusted. From there Id suggest a simple search of the forums to see some security measures you can take to stop such things.

You should only allow data of a certain format with User Inputted data so if it is to be numbers than use is_numeric or a cast (int)

rehfeld

also, keep in mind sometimes all it takes is for a website w/ high traffic or high pagerank to post a link to your website.

all of a sudden you will have tons of visitors, either directly from people following that link, or possibly due to googles opinion of how important your site is, leading to your website being a high ranker in search results.

an extreme example of this is commonly referred to as the "slashdot effect" or being "slashdotted".

slashdot.org is a website w/ extreme amounts of visitors, and when someone posts a link to your website, the amount of traffic resulting from it can bring your server to a crawl.

google for "slashdot effect" to read more

but really, the first thing you need to do is look at the log file, or if you have some visitor statistics to look at. take a look at where these visitors are coming from.