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New Spam Frontier: Referer Logs

Posted by timothy on from the die-spammers-die dept.

geoffsmith writes "Wired News is reporting that spammers are using referer logs as a cheap new way to spam small sites. Anyone running a website has probably already seen this phenomenon; I'm thinking of writing a script to remove these entries from my access_log by looking for hits that don't grab my images. (sorry lynx users!)"

3 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Re:huh by calyxa · · Score: 5, Informative
    no, they hit the page with their link in the referrer field. some sites post reports from their web logs showing where hits are referred from, so it'd be like:

    255.255.255.255 - - [27/Oct/2002:00:00:00 -0000] "GET /perfectly/valid/page/at/yoursite.html" 200 2467 "http://www.wilddonkeysex.com_for_Wild_Donkey_Sex/ " "(SpamBot5000)"

    and then people looking at the report would say, "hey, the page at wilddonkeysex links to my perfectly/valid/page and it's getting like 500 hits a day from there, woo! let's click on that url and see what the link to my page looks like!"

    -calyxa

    --
    Decay! Decay! Decay! -Helium
  2. Re:They will never stop. by IIRCAFAIKIANAL · · Score: 5, Informative

    Please do not equate civil disobedience and P2P. Civil disobedience is essentially something you do in the open with the intention of getting caught and possibly prosecuted.

    If you want to learn about what civil disobedience really is, check this or this out.

    If you think that the Internet is the most active battlefield today, you need to visit a few places.

    --
    Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
  3. Re:referer information should be disabled by defau by stienman · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's nice, as a site operator, to know where your guests are coming from. A good portion of my visitors come from Google and other search engines. The referrer log lets me know what they were searching for, and in nearly 95% of the cases they were looking for a specific topic on my site. I can send them directly there, give them a specific welcome message if they haven't been to my site before, etc.

    Furthermore I can restrict traffic for some areas of my site (like some sites that block links from slashdot) for particular reasons or uses. "You just came from the page of an associate and are able to receive a discount." "This page is restricted to users of xyz.com. Please go there first."

    Lastly, it protects my image content. My images are not stellar, and yet other sites continue to use them on their pages. I can use the referrer to limit the damage done by only allowing the images to be referred by pages from my own site.

    Referrer information may be annoying to you, but it's an extrememly useful tool. If taken away one restricts opportunities for the site operator to personalize and protect content on their site. Not a huge loss, but it isn't really as great a privacy issue as you seem to believe.

    -Adam