Monday, July 15, 2013

Referral Spam Overload

Updated 15 July 2013 with screen captures and testing Tor for browsing.

A very quick post; referral spam went nuts the past 24 hours on the blog totalling 35 hits. The culprits:

adsensewatchdog . com

adsensewatchdog spam 01

This is what it looks like without Tor and NoScript. A wide index of terms so they get hits. Just another fake search engine riding the real ones to get traffic and money for pages served.

adsensewatchdog spam 02

With Tor (an untrackable browser) and NoScript it looks completely different. Fancier parked graphics and no links.

zombiestat . com

zombiestat spam 01zombiestat spam 02

Another site hoping to harvest data and get clicks it has a twin named vampirestat. which is the same exact thing but with a vampire graphic.

adsenserrors . info

adsenserrors info spam 01adsenserrors info spam 02

This looks familiar, doesn’t it? Same people that are behind adsensewatchdog must be behind this. Still getting different results from Tor Browser and regular Firefox even after disabling Noscript.

villainstat . com

villainstat spam

Same perpetrators as zombiestat and vampirestat. They are practicing the black hat art of domain crowding in order to maximize hits.

probtheme . com

probtheme spam 01probtheme spam 02

This site might be somewhat legitimate, but is using spam to get attention. Looking at how poorly trafficked it is in posts and likes it appears referral spamming is failing to generate results. Nothing appears to have been updated past November 2012.

uglystat . com

uglystat spam

Gosh, I wonder who is behind this site? The mind boggles.

These are not legit sites so do not click on them, Blogger users!

UPDATE: Oh and one thing that has changed – the hits all say from the USA with this wave, rather than Russia.

They continue to hammer away, the grand total since they started is 75 hits.

3 comments:

Giridhar said...

My new blog got so many pageviews in 6 hours straight !!

vampirestat.com 42
adsensewatchdog.com 36
www.villainstat.com 18
www.uglystat.com 17
www.probtheme.com 15

I don't know how to stop them.

Patrick D. Boone said...

There really isn't a way to stop them, unfortunately. It may be my imagination, but it seems that I get an increase in hits from them when I post about security issues.

That won't stop me from posting about it and hopefully not you.

Unknown said...

Thank you very much for answering this for me... I'm getting tired of their hits outnumbering the hits I get from the people I'm actually trying to write to. God bless you and yours.