Hmm

I’ve just received a traffic warning from 34sp – it seems that I’ve had more than 9GB of traffic this month compared with my limit of 3GB, and so should expect a bill for about £9. Hmm.
Would backing up my databases in two formats (two enormous files) have caused this? Previously, my traffic had been around 2GB and increasing by about 10% per month.

EDIT: looks like the Santy C worm. I’m working on a block.
FURTHER EDIT: this site is under attack. If you use WP or any other PHP script, you need to protect NOW. Go here.
YET FURTHER EDIT: I’ve implemented the .htaccess edit recommended by "thepete" in the forum linked above. I’ll monitor it tomorrow and see what has happened. I think that WP has blocked all the bot requests but has served a lot of 404s. I also seem to have been serving an enormous number of 404s to bots that have been looking through my old MT archive files (so, if you have links to my old MT generated pages, they will no longer work as they have been purged). I’ll keep you posted.
EDIT THE FOURTH: the edit of the .htaccess file has not worked. I’ve had more than 2GB of bandwidth eaten last night. So I’ve added some lines to the top of my index.php file as recommended in the first post in the forum thread linked to above. I’m really keen to fix this, as every GB of bandwidth costs me £1.50 and the money is being eaten at a frightening rate, so any suggestions are welcome! I’ll report back on the success or otherwise of the latest change.
EDIT THE FIFTH: the latest attempt seems to have worked completely, and my bandwidth consumption has dropped dramatically. Hurrah!