[russellw]

Thanks for the patience.
We had been seeing unusual activity since August with higher than normal bandwidth utilisation and page loads but as the usage here can be a bit seasonal anyway, I hadn't paid much attention to it until the last week in September where had one day that used more bandwidth (1.4 Tb) than we normally use in a month followed by two days with 4x the daily average each.
A bit of a dive showed inordinately high guest numbers and some further analysis showed that a lot (~80%) of these were coming from an AWS host in Singapore which I had blocked at the forum level a week ago but they could still hit the database and add to the server load even if they did only get a blocked error message so I attempted to block them at the firewall yesterday (without success) and this morning, successfully. Guest numbers have since dropped from 5.7k to 2.4k and will continue to drop as those sessions from the 47.128 range die and time out.
Apologies for the issues.