Breakdown of bandwidth suckers

[csramotorsports]

I recently got shut down for excessive resource abuse. I'm trying to pinpoint the exact location of where it's coming from.

In my history tab, the email that was sent was for these items...
phpBB/viewtopic.php
phpBB/posting.php
phpBB/viewforum.php

Upon going through my access logs, I can see that there are a lot of these items with multiple postings at the exact same time and with the same IP's... How's that possible?

The access log, within an hours time had jumped to over 4,000,000(bytes?) I went ahead and shut the forums down, until I could find out more info on this. At the time there were about 22 members online. Nothing too large I'd say, at least to cause problems anyways.

I'm stumped. What could be sucking so much? We exceeded 5GB in less than 24hours the other day. Just some info on the site. We have 500+members, and there are 3-500 posts per day. We did have a photoalbum, and some videos on the site. I have taken those down for the time being.

Thanks for your help

[Croc Hunter]

If this just happened out of the blue, a one off thing I suspect an attack though usually the logs will be a few seconds apart in that case. chmod all your forums .php files to 600 except index.php .css etc. ....at the exact same time and with the same IP's... Is the IP known to the forum?. Like is it a members IP?. if not post it here with part of your logs.

The other thing could be a script gone haywire.