Requested URL invalid error and VSE becomes unusable through high CPU usage.

Products

• Service Virtualization

Issue/Introduction

After running for a day or two, the VSE is suddenly using a lot of CPU despite very few requests being sent to the Virtual Services. 

Searching for ERROR entries in the vse.log, a large number of errors similar to the following are shown: 
[PortServer:0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0:9500] ERROR com.itko.lisa.vse.http.Endpoint - The requested URL /cgi-bin-sdb/printenv is invalid and not found on this server
[PortServer:0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0:9500] ERROR com.itko.lisa.vse.http.Endpoint - The requested URL /cgi-mod/index.cgi is invalid and not found on this server

The ports and the URLs are all different. Example URLs similar to: 
/cgi-mod/index.cgi, /user_settings.cfg, /cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi, /admin.cgi, /index.cgi, /cgi-bin/admin, /administrator.cgi, /index.pl

Environment

DevTest Service Virtualization 10.7

Resolution

Because of the list of URLs that are targeted on the VSE, it is clear that these requests are not coming from client apps being tested by developers. 

These URLs are an indication that a scanning tool is probing different ports and trying different URLs.

Possible solutions would be to only allow networking access from the developers and not from the scanning tool by way of a firewall. Or ask the team with the scanning tool not to target the machines with the VSE.

It is also possible to use the following property setting for the VSE if you know the IP addresses where the scanning requests are coming from:
lisa.vse.blacklist.hosts=<HOST_IP_1>,<HOST_IP_2>,<HOST_IP_3>