Hi everyone,

Since yesterday 8am gmt my forums have been under a http attack. The application that is doing the attack seems to be doing it through multiple proxies so i cant simply ban the ip. It's been going on for over a day now. How can I stop this?

What exactly is it doing? There's a lot of different types of http attacks.

Okay basically it's running multiple search queries through multiple proxies (hundreds and hundreds and thousands) in the hope to crash the server. Temporarily I've taken the forums down (renamed the dir).

Ah right, so its basicly constantly "refreshing" a search string with different IPs?

Yes.... yes (wouldnt let me post with 3 characters)

Disable the search, or add the 30sec / 1 minute delay in it.

Adding any time limit wont really matter as it's lots of different ip's. I've also blocked guests from searching. What i've done as a temporary solution is simply rename search.php.

Is there anyway of limiting the maximum people that can be on the forums at a giventime?

Nope, there is a way of limiting the server load though. This should be in the vBulletin options.

can you not set/ move your forums to a secure directory/ root and run your site as https: rather than http: and if its set properly on registered users can view the forums but, this also means the spiders cans scan your forums??
its up to you i cant think of any other solution at the minute. i would have thought that setting it so only registered users can search would have fixed it and spiders can still scan your forums and achieves.

Contact your host. Their servers are under atack and they will know what to do. If you fail to contact them and it escalates to a point that it interupts service to their other customers they may not be happy with you for not notifying them earlier. It will only escalate so notify them.