Thousands different hosts doing a GET / - whats up?
Since Dececember 14, the first day the host was online, I've gotten about 15000 hits from all over the planet all just doing a "GET / HTTP/1.1", all of the user-agents being "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)". No referer, and nothing else requested. A real browser request gets an img on the page and, since that's not happening, this seems to be a bot-like thing.
There are almost no repeated IP's.
These GET's would have to go directly to my IP address or at least not include a "Host:" HTTP header which would violate the HTTP 1.1 protocol and Apache would have put something in the error log. The virtual hosts have their own log and none of them have anything interesting in this context.
At some level I guess this doesn't hurt anything other than bandwidth, but I'm trying to understand what is going on. The request interval varies from a few seconds to over a minute. It's not DDOS'ing me but I would like to understand what is going on.
A bunch of zombies? Why my host? Any thoughts about what is going on would be very appreciated.
