It is this lack of information that likely led some of the members of the PowerBASIC forums to block the IP range 66.154.* from accessing their various websites, and justifiably so. But this same lack of information led to additional questions: What files was the Assertivenet spider accessing/trying to access? Was the spider crawling pages or, like some bots, was it looking for specific files that could be used for malicious purposes (e.g. files and scripts that could be manipulated for website attacks?)

At this point, I decided to look beyond what the website traffic statistics revealed, as well as the information that Mark's initial search revealed. I needed to start by answering the questions I posed earlier, and in order to do so, I needed to access the raw log files for the Hibiscus website.