Looking at my business' web logs the other day, I noticed that a certain set of our programmer utilities were being downloaded thousands of times each month. Awesome, right? The weird thing (besides the spelling of "weird") is that the download counts for each of these utilities were nearly identical. And since these particular utilities were actually ten versions of the same C library, just built for different versions of Microsoft's Visual Studio, having identical download counts of really made no sense at all.

So, a little deeper digging showed that nearly all of these downloads were coming from one IP address: in China. And they weren't just going after those utilities, they were downloading everything on the site: every page, ZIP file, picture, etc.. So I did a little web server magic to give them a 404 error (file not found), whenever they tried to get anything at all from our site. That stopped them from downloading, but it didn't stop them from trying. Every thirty minutes, on the dot, these clowns (220.181.157.*) still connect to our site and try to download everything on it - twice.

What do you suppose the point of this is? What are they trying to do? Automatically duplicate our site on their servers?