I've got a web based application that I've developed and I'm seeing a lot of wget requests on the site. Should I be worried that someone is trying to hack/rip the site. I don't know what they would do with it, the "intelligence" of the system in all on the server side.
But it makes me nervous. Should I be?
Wget is a standard UNIX/Linux tool used to mirror a site (can be used as web spider/web crawler), seeing lots of requests would be consistent with such use. You should worry only when most of those HTTP GETs are for pages that don't exist or come for typical web administration packets (phpmyadmin, etc.).
... it makes me nervous. Should I be?
It's in your best interest to find out a little bit more about where the wget requests are coming from - this could be a prelude to a scraped version of your content appearing elsewhere (though only a lazy thief would leave wget set as the user agent - wget [...] --user-agent=agent-string will change it).
Definitely check out what an rWHOIS lookup for the IP returns and see if there are any scraper sites associated with it, consider limiting simultaneous requests, and get in touch with your lawyer (or just send a DMCA yourself) if copyrights are being infringed.
