Script kiddies need lives

NodeHam

No problems with nodebb, just an observation of so many people wasting their lives trying to hack others. Some having the potential to be highly skilled and well paid folks but instead spend their time trying to hurt others.

I put a site online just to test a few things. It's not advertised or mentioned anywhere yet but look at the stats.
Lots of hits from bots, most presumably looking for Wordpress sites. I just thought it was interesting and wanted to share.

julian

@NodeHam are they script kiddies? It looks like you have a huge number of login attempts.

NodeHam

Yes but aren't those usually script kiddies?
The number of unique visitors is only 202 while the login attempts are nearly 15K for yesterday alone.
That seems to suggest few bots trying login repeatedly.

julian

@NodeHam depends what needs to happen to increment the login counter. If they're just hitting the login endpoint it actually shouldn't count as a login...

NodeHam

Well, I wasn't posting looking for technical information but now you have me curious :).

Looking at the logs, they strongly suggest automated bot activity.
Hits from
Googlebot and other search crawlers
WordPress vulnerability scanners
Automated scanning tools like ZGrab

Are these triggering login attempts either by mistake or as part of their crawling process?
Googlebot, for example, accesses various URLs, including login pages, and might cause login events.

Many of the requests are targeting /wp-admin/setup-config.php, /wordpress/wp-admin/setup-config.php, /xmlrpc.php, /wlwmanifest.xml, and similar WordPress-related URLs.

Since it's not a WP site, are these requests resulting in redirects or 301 responses, but getting counted in access logs that result in the dashboard stats?

julian

@NodeHam yeah, I'm not sure. That's what's going to need looking into.

NodeHam

One question. Are the dashboard logs derived from the web server logs or directly from the nodebb code? I assume directly.

julian

@NodeHam said in Script kiddies need lives:

directly from the nodebb code

️

NodeHam

Yup, it is internal.

I found this for anyone that comes across this.
https://community.nodebb.org/topic/12493/nodebb-plugin-prometheus-prometheus-monitoring-for-nodebb