Slashdot Mirror
New Spam Frontier: Referer Logs
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!)"
"I'll adapt or I'll discontinue. I'm not planning on becoming the major annoyance of the blogging world.... I'm not too worried my reputation. Marketing is all about being innovative, different, adaptive, taking risks and knowing how to use the technology. I'm trying to be all that."
Heh, it's funny that this guy can make this statement and expect to be taken seriously. It's even more pathetic that he actually thinks he's "innnovative".
I don't know who started it - but I find it very odd that browsers send referer info by default. Why? It does not provide anything extra for the user but problems. It is not once or twice that you find URLs to "confidential" pages if you browse through your webserver logs. And... I bet 95% of web surfers do not even know that they are sending this information all the time. Is there really any reason why the default is to send the referer info? I have seen people riot on much less important privacy issues. Why not about this? The referer plague exists in almost all browsers - and only in few browsers you actually can easily turn it off. What's going on?
True, but at the same time wrong. Has anybody else noticed that the internet is currently the most active battlefield in hostory?
Lowlife (but capitolist god bless 'em) pigs generate spam to sell their penis enlargement scam and mail clients develop ways to filter and block email. Distraction.
Distributed Denial of Service attacks attempt to shake the very foundations of the NET through bandwidth flooding and sysadmins implement redundancy and load balancing. Jamming - Frequency Hopping.
Remote exploits and virus appear everyday and patches are generated quickly for the more quality OS's and virus updates are required daily for Micro$oft OS's. Infiltration.
Governing bodies exist that the people disagree with such as the RIAA and MPAA. Demonstrations are held in both violent(DDoS) and non-violent(civil disobedience of P2P) manners. Revolution.
Needless to say, civilization has managed to survive for thousands of years despite man's desire to control everything including his fellow men. I think the internet will find a way.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
It is extremely useful for security purposes.
No, not the security most people are thinking of. Checking to see if the user came from FeedBack.html before executing FormMail.pl is no security, since spammers can forge any referer they want.
I'm talking about security which stops a human user who is logged in to a particular website from being tricked into performing actions they didn't authorise. For instance: I log into my server's adminsitrative area. Then, in another window, I browse someone's blog. And I click on their "search" button. As it turns out, this search button is a trap, which sends me to my own admin area with a command to delete someone's account. I'm logged in, I have a valid network address, I'm active, there's no problem. Except that fortunately my browser sends "Referer: www.blog.org" instead of "Referer: www.admin.com".
That's why referer info is useful: to prevent a user from being hijacked.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
For now I'll delete the entries by hand, but if this increases it could get really annoying.
AlpineR
And this is, of course, broken behaviour.
So do you have an alternative proposal to prevent resource (i.e. bandwidth) theft? That is a very real problem, and no amount of arguing that the current solution is "broken" will get people to change unless you provide them an alternative.