Thread: sudden disturbing jump in anonymous customers

We have a small ML store, vs. 9. We typically have 5 to 7 registering customers in a day, and anywhere from 4 to 10 anonymous customers.

Today, so far (mid afternoon) we have 5 registering customers, and in the last few hours alone, *40* anonymous customers. And, it keeps rising every few minutes.

Security & maintenance logs look clean, the failed transaction log is clean, the number of visitors for today is actually a little lower than average.

Is this anything to be concerned about? We've never seen this in 4 years of having the web store.

We had something along these lines and found it was a rogue crawler bot. We tracked it down, found it used 3 different IPs and blocked them.

Check your database for the customers - look at the ones without email address - then compare IP addresses and times created. From there you can work out what is happening.

Hope it helps.

edit:
for checking IPs I would advise
http://www.projecthoneypot.org

Thanks for the tip, e-trade.

Looked over the customer list, and they all have email addresses; it's something we require on our site, and nobody has been able to circumvent it.

The run on anonymous customers is continuing today; already 25 and there were probably 80 (est) by the end of yesterday.

No bogus orders, no apparent slow-down, but it's really skewing our numbers.

I'm going to check our web-stats and see if there is something to be found there.

Any other suggestions?

Here, this might help.

Run this SQL query

C#/VB.NET Code:

SELECT
    CreatedOn,
    LastIPAddress,
    Referrer
FROM
    Customer WITH (NOLOCK)
WHERE
    Email = ''
    AND    CreatedOn > dateadd(dy, -7, getdate())
ORDER BY
    CustomerID DESC 


It will show when the anon customer was created (something was added to the basket thus they are added as an anon customer), the last IP address - use this to check against on the honey pot project (if you see the same IP multiple times) and the referrer - so where they came from, spam bots etc. do not normally have referrers.

It will get the information from the customer table where they have a blank email (thus an anon customer) and they were created within 7 days ago (change the value from -7 for less days i.e. -3 for today and two days back.)

Finally it will order them from the latest to the oldest.

From here you will get a clearer indication of what is going on with your anon customers.

Hope it helps out!

Rockin'. I'll pass it on to our IT guy.

Thanks for your kindness.