SCP reporting suspiciously high usage of network of my server

Emojinetcup · 3. April 2023

Today is 3/4/2023 in UTC+8, which is very near the start of this month. However, SCP reported that the server have used up 64 GiB of network traffic. I was wondering how did I, or any programs running on my server, or any legitimate HTTPS requests (all malformed requests were filtered out by Cloudflare), were able to fetch or send that large amount of data within four days. Is that due to the difference in the definition of “a month”, or I will really have to check my own server's log?

mlohr · 3. April 2023

I think, regardless of any other possibility, the very first step is to check your own server's log. In my opinion, this is the obligation for someone running a server, in case of any question or wondering about its behavior. If, and only if you can rule out that this is a problem on your side, start looking for other options. Even the option exists that it's just "a spike in random noise", in case, nothing further has to be done. Anyway, you should be sure about this.