Hi,
I thought someone might be familiar with apache and expected behavior to know whether the access_log entries below are attack attempts, or something less alarming. I'm seeing repeated entries like these from a handful of IP addresses at a time, all with 404 errors using "POST /index.php":
222.186.24.108 - - [01/Nov/2011:16:56:29 -0400] "POST /index.php HTTP/1.1" 404 7168 "http://www.example.com/index.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:6.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0.2" 31508 7609 222.186.24.108 - - [01/Nov/2011:16:56:46 -0400] "POST /index.php HTTP/1.1" 404 7169 "http://www.example.com/index.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:6.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0.2" 85912 7610
Is this a known exploit attempt? The server has been responding slowly, and I believe this is partly the cause.
I've installed OSSEC and set a rule that drops an IP address for 30 minutes after 10 404s in a reasonably short time.
Yes, I've implemented iptables to drop the attempts. I was really just curious if it was a specific attack with a known pattern so I could investigate further. fail2ban is great for things like this.
Thanks, Alex