11000 hits on db_input.php in 8 days. ???

[salewit]

There is some serious spamming of some kind going on at my site. I'm getting tons of bounced e-mails I never sent. So I'm trying to find what may be causing this. I looked at my May log and #1 on the list is the Coppermine db_input.php has 10,872 hits on it in 8 days (which I estimate is about 1 every minute). Next in line is displayimage.php with 2000 views which seems really excessive, but may be possible.

I DO have the CAPTCHA mod installed and I'm thinking there is some connection there.

Any information would be appreciated.

Sam

[salewit]

It seems I always find my answers AFTER I post the question. Never mind. Found it using different search terms. Looks like it is robots from the search engines

[Joachim Müller]

No, those hits don't come from legitimate search engine spiders. They come from bot attacks, where malevolent users try to flood your gallery (using script-driven bots) with spam comments. You should be save against those attacks when using comment captchas.