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Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Forget Mystery Meat, How About Mystery Spam?

Just in time for the end of the year, I found a new referral spam in my Blogger statistics. http: // semalt . com / competitors_review . php? u= (then my blog address) is obvious spam due to it having text suggesting that someone is competing with my website and checking me out.

Semalt Spam

Using a virtual machine and TOR to be anonymous, I checked out the address. It only gets me to the home page where a requirement to register first stopped me cold. Of course, it wants you to log in using your Facebook, Google Plus, or Microsoft Live accounts. Oh, nothing suspicious about that, is there?

It offers to show you what your Google rankings are, which is interesting given that you can sign up for Google’s own tools for free to do the same. As the page loaded, I noticed that it loaded counter . yadro . ru , a Russian address I only fleetingly glimpsed. Some sites report this as a malware infection while others that it is simply a tracking site like Google analytics. Still a bad guy according to most, so consider it a red flag.

The privacy policy and terms of use pages are generic giving no useful information. There was no way I’d sign up to find out what lied beneath the barebones page other than to look at the source html. In there the meta description of the content bills the site as a “Professional keyword ranking monitoring service with competitor analysis. Fee plans.”  Also found in the code was the yadro address, so that is being loaded as a hit counter.

My advice to all who get a variant of this link in their statistics is to avoid clicking on it. Semalt is most likely only there to harvest data to access your email and social accounts with the possible additional goal of selling SEO (search engine optimization) methods.

UPDATE

I’m seeing more hits from this spam showing up in StatCounter now and they are coming from computers in different countries with differing versions of Windows and screen resolutions.  This means a bot net of infected computers is most likely being used to push the spam rather than forged addresses.

Please do not click on the link and if you have, run an antivirus program along with something like MalwareBytes or Spybot to make sure you haven’t been infected.

15 comments:

  1. Thanks so much for publishing this post. I just noticed the same referrer on my blog and since it appeared to be linked to one of my most popular posts I was trying to figure out in what context the post was being used. However, I couldn't get past the login page and when I googled the URL minus my blog link, I found you. Good to know it's just spam.

    Happy new year!

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  2. Glad to know I'm not the only one! These guys started showing up in may stats yesterday. Yes, I clicked and yes, I got the same login screen. By today, they were on all of my sites hosted at BlueHost...

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  3. Anonymous8:03 PM

    Hi Patrick,

    I too, have just had this referral link show up in my Wordpress blog stats as at today's date.
    When I googled it I found your page, so thanks for your information although I confess I don't understand a lot of the technical jargon.

    Happy New Year to you from Australia.

    Genevieve (www.lifeincamelot.wordpress.com)

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  4. Gillian - You're welcome and happy New Year to you too.

    Tom - They seem to be hitting a lot of blogs on different platforms. Blogs are often started by website rookies who are more eager to check out link backs. At least that's my theory of why they hit blogs so heavily.

    Genevieve - Have a happy New Year down under and let me know if you need anything explained.

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  5. Truly strange when I discovered the traffic and the sign up page looks very suspicious!
    Great blog and thanks for sharing!

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  6. Hey, thanks so much for the explanation. I clicked on the link but didn't go any further - wasn't willing to sign in until I learned more about it - which I did here.
    And, btw, I'm on typepad.
    My concern now is what to do - I use a free antivirus program but I'm not sure what else I should run in case there's malware loaded now.
    Again, thanks for the help here.

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  7. Anonymous2:04 AM

    The same with my website.. Does anyone know how to block this website? I want to know my real site statistics, without these spam visitors..

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  8. The best way to deal with spam messing with your statistics for a small blog is to use a hit counter that gives more details and allows you to filter results. Google Analytics is the most comprehensive free one and I also use the free version of StatCounter. The latter is limited in the unpaid version.

    Some referral spam can be blocked if you use WordPress, but those of us using Blogger don't have that kind of option. I'm afraid I don't know which plugins and options work for WordPress since I have no experience with it.

    Unfortunately, this particular spam can't be blocked by IP address due to it apparently being sent out over a botnet of infected PCs or through proxies of some kind. Like I wrote in the post, I'm seeing it showing up from different countries and now continents with the latest originating from Brazil.

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  9. Thanks for the info. It showed up on my blog stats yesterday.

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  10. Anonymous5:33 AM

    Thanks for the info. It showed up on my blog on 31 Dec 2013 and gave me so many traffics. It's tempting to click that link but I decided to look it up on google and found your post. So again, thanks a lot!

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  11. Anonymous3:15 AM

    I,m getting them too from Columbia, Italy, Brazil best ignored i feel.

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  12. Anonymous4:27 AM

    This stops hits registering for me

    // your stats code goes here
    

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  13. Thanks once again for posting on yet more dodgy visitors. Much appreciated!

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  14. Anonymous12:58 PM

    Thanks for your insight! It did seem really weird that suddenly Semalt.com cared a lot about a flock of sheep in Vermont!

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  15. Madaline4:17 PM

    This was grrrreat. Thank you so so much. I've been getting hits from this site the last couple of days and like sheepandpickle wondered why Semalt.com wondered so much about a flock of sheep in Vermont, I wondered why they cared so much about the music I'm listening to while pregnant. Thanks! Madaline
    (musicandmybaby.com)

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