I have noticed that my logs are suggesting that bots are attempting to attack my server.  It seems that these attacks are failing but they are slowing down my server and effecting my website because of how often they are attacking my site.  Luckily I am not fully launched yet but I was hoping to soon and these problems will have to be solved by then.  Unfortunately I have very few ideas on how to keep this from happening.  As I said either dotnetnuke or my firewall is appears to be stopping the attacks from doing what they want, it is just the request slowing things down.  Is there any way to stop these request in their tracks?  I think it might be possible to ban their IP addresses but they are varried and so Im not sure how to block them all, or if I do that they wouldn't just come from another place. Any suggestions would be great. 

Greg:

Mitch's suggestions are valid, but they will put a strain on both you and the server, as this is a labor intensive task.  In addition, many of the automated bots are located outside of the US and you will not be able to do anything with those.  And the attacks come from many different addresses.  One option is to ignore them but be vigilant.

The ideal solution would be to use a firewall or dedicated device that can filter specifically on HTTP traffic strings (like the SQL injection attacks).  This may not be feasible for you as they are expensive, somewhat complex, and not even a possibility in some environments.  In this way all the filtering is done at the network periphery and the server never even sees the bad traffic.

I only wish firewalls would have an easy way to block traffic by country of origin, that would alleviate a big chunk of the hacking attempts.  Let's see what happens when we finally move to IPv6.

Carlos

Greg:

Here are two links that may give you more information:

http://www.port80software.com/products/serverdefender/ 
http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/web-site-firewall-overview.php

Carlos