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My site received unusual spike of traffic today and they are all from the US, which is outside of my market. My site normally gets about 70-80 daily entrances according to Google Analytics, but there were 350 direct traffic today, and mainly from the states. Could it be someone is trying to hack into my site? If so, what actions could I make to avoid my site from being hacked?

Thanks, J

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  • it could also be someone who is running a bot to scrape all the content on your site. Mar 8, 2013 at 5:29

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It could be any number of things. You could have been linked in a blog post somewhere and gone minimally viral, a robot or spider could have found you and indexed you for some purpose or another, or it could be an attack or the precursor to an attack, a user in your geographical area using a proxy, and probably a few dozen other scenarios are possible.

Whenever you get a suspicious spike in traffic your first action should be to check the server logs covering the time of the spike. Check to see if this is the result of one source or several, how the user-agent is identified, check the IP address against lists of known bad IPs and otherwise mine your data to determine what is happening.

tl;dr Don't jump to a conclusion. A spike may be a good thing.

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  • I need to check with my host for the log. I was extremely busy in that week and forgot to download the raw log. Thanks
    – jsmoove88
    Mar 14, 2013 at 2:49
  • The web host could not get a backup copy of weblogs for me. Could not look at the data again.
    – jsmoove88
    Mar 17, 2013 at 15:46
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Wait until the next day and review your Google Analytics data. I would suggest looking only at a single day time frame and reviewing landing pages.

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  • All came from Palo Alto, running Safari on Linux. Does it sound weird?
    – jsmoove88
    Mar 14, 2013 at 2:44

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