Blog search spamming

My MT activity log shows several days worth of high volume searches for random names which makes me suspect someone’s bot is trying a DoS attack against MT blogs (or blogs in general) using the blog’s search service. MT’s built-in search script is pretty painfully slow, so a high enough search volume can potentially bring a server to its knees.

Fortunately for MT, an easy way to mitigate this type of attack (if that’s what this is) is with the Fast Search plugin, which mostly replaces MT’s built-in search script. It’s not a complete replacement because it doesn’t handle tag searching, but for the plain old Search box for your blog it works quite nicely.