There is a worm going around that affects certain versions of our forum software. Ours is patched to prevent this, but the number of requests per second was nearly killing the servers. As you can probably see it appears we had 1000 worms hitting us at once at 5am today.
To prevent the slowdown that we've been having the forums now detect the current incarnation of the worm and disconnect it before serving up the forums so no database hit is required.