This post is referring to other sites that scrape content and are potential triggers for doing what I call "Regional Replacement" (changing the sites ranking by associating the content with a different region) - OR - Duplicating the content in hopes of devaluing the site in Google search as the effect does not work in Yahoo and MSN. The proxies being indexed is intentionally done by a third party as there is no way to physically spider the proxy pages unless linked by another site as a Google submission.

An attack on a server from simultaneous connections is usually called a DOS Attack (Denial of Service) and the goal there is to take the server down and not the Google Rankings.

I did notice that once I banned a specific region from one of our sites, that region (according to Alexa) now accounts for 35% of the traffic, so I have to wonder what is going on and how and why.

There are scraper sites that send out spiders to copy content so they can get Adsense or other paid search clicks, the goal is to steal relevant content hoping Google will find their sites more related and get them to rank so people will click the paid search ads, ironically its usually Google Adsense. So this is a bit of a different type of scraper then the proxy sites. I would recommend you permanently ban them at the server level. You most likely will not be able to remove them from Google with the URL removal tool as the content scraping method is not always live its more of a copy.

The other scraper theory for Negative SEO is to try and associate the site with low quality websites (by scraping content and linking back). This makes Google think you are a spammer and potentially auto-penalize you or set you up for manual review.

You can consider filing a DMCA complaint if there is enough content stolen, but that will NOT get rankings back (if lost) and can be time consuming. There are other methods of defense but I do not believe anything is full proof.

Since we do not own the search engines and since Google never responds to these situations, we have to assume that there can be evidence for an against them and they can be washed out as theory. What you cannot claim to be theory is intentional indexing of sites in multiple proxies and their sudden drop in rankings at the same time. This is more common then Matt Cutts and Google will admit to or even address. If the effect is minor, then we can call it "Stale Content" which is common for business sites that get scraped and do not update their content frequently.

I was thinking that when people are trying to do a site over as you explained they try to make multiple connections, so I set a limit to the number of connections possible via LFD, so if they try over a certain umber they get blocked and have found attemts are slowing down.

Host support thinks these were people scraping my sites, I am hoping the problem will be over.