I checked my stats today and found a referral that looked extremely suspicious:
mysql . removeyourcontent . com / russ_pornbb_spider / admin / hentai_check . php
An attempt to access this through a virtual machine asked for an admin login plus password and when I limited it to the domain I got an Apache 2 test page. Apache is one of the most common software packages that runs servers.
To my eyes, it appears to be a misconfigured spider checking web sites to see if it can drop porn spam. Either that or it is looking for porn. The hentai part of it relates to anime and the referral showed up on one of my anime reviews. Since I don’t have any hentai this is a dead end if it is a search.
Could it also be a way to get into an Apache server? I wish I knew more about the software to say.
Hi Patrick,
ReplyDeleteThis particular spam is clever, I clicked on it, even though I avoid spam religiously. This is my main concern about ,for example, Vampirestats that visited my new blog maybe 500 times since the beginning of July. I fear that they lift pieces of my writing, dump it somewhere on their site and so benefit from people clicking on it. I am a beginner, but why else do they keep and keep returning. I also have all the other spam you mentioned in your comments. Is it even possible that they block legitimate visitors? These are true parasites.
Marie
One comment: when I send this comment I do not know whether it went through or not. There is no acknowledgement right away, such as 'your email was sent'. It worries me, because the robot check is very difficult to read. So I am never quite sure. You are though extremely kind and respond to every person. How you manage with your CFS, I cannot imagine.
Marie - Usually if there is no complaint from the page when you click on "Publish Your Comment" it goes through. There is a delay in seeing it because I have chosen to review every comment before allowing them to be published. This is to keep inappropriate language and content from appearing on the blog. Comments get indexed by Google and other search engines too.
ReplyDeleteThat can be frustrating for people and in my logs I've seen people start to comment but not follow through probably due to the hassle. I may experiment with removing Captcha (the robot check) part of the security.
On Vampirestats, they don't strike me as being content pirates. Instead they prey on the vanity of people wanting to see how much their blog is supposedly worth. Content scrapers never spam, they just cut and paste or use a "spider" to download all your text and images then copy them to their website. This happens more to tech and photography websites.
The reason the spam keeps hitting your site is because it is all automated with programmed scripts. It's like setting a robot loose with a command that keeps it going around in circles. There is next to no human interaction involved, which makes it less scary yet oddly more annoying.
The good news is that they don't block legitimate visitors. Blogger stats only shows the top ten in any category so you may miss seeing visits from real people. That's why having a Google Analytics account hooked up to the blog is a good idea.
Heh, some days I don't manage, or at least don't think I do. It's a penalty of being a classic type A personality. However, being of service to others in even small ways helps more than I can convey in words.