Bot attacks?

[Jack1014]

Google notified us of a large increase in soft 404 errors. The log shows that starting on Feb 17, and continuing every day or so, someone is entering a zoom query into the zoom search box. I think they mistake it for the Google combined search/address box. Maybe this is an attempt at script insertion?? All of the 155 incidents so far involve 1 of 2 strings, either

search.php?zoom_query=Size+between+3+2F8+26+11+2F3 2&zoom_page=[some number]&zoom_per_page=10&zoom_and=0&zoom_sort=0

or

search.php?zoom_query=earn-make-money.com+steps+to+make+cash+in+ebay+for+free&zoom _page=[some number]&zoom_per_page=10&zoom_and=0&z[rest lost]

Does this make sense to anyone?

[David]

There are a huge number of bots doing all kinds of random stuff on the net.
Some are for automated advertising, some for probing your site for vulnerabilities, some for denial of services attacks, some for indexing your site into external engines, etc..

Many of the bots seem to be doing stuff that makes nor sense or stuff that might only work on 1 in 1000 sites (e.g. posting comments on a blog form).

But 155 incidents is a tiny number over 9 days. Shouldn't have any impact at all on your site? Just ignore it. Hard to believe this would cause a 404 error (which means page not found).

We got 20,000+ hits from a Chinese DoS in under an hour a couple of weeks ago. Once it hits that level you need to start to worry. Solution was to load up the 10,000 IP addresses into the firewall and block them all for a few days.