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!)"

Comments

Well..

[Find love Online]

Yeah, I havn't been getting much spam in my hotmail box anymore. But then again I did block all email into the thing...

Re:referer information should be disabled by defau

[phliar]

Yes, referrer information makes an excellent authentication scheme for highly confidential system dealing with transfer of mission critical information. ... Just also check for a magic string in the user agent and voila! trusted computing reinvented.

Heh-heh! It's amazing how moronic some "security" is. I use an HTTP proxy (Privoxy) that not only blocks all ads, it allows me to set the Referer: on all outgoing requests to the base URL. Most of these sites just check that Referer: is a URL on their own site.

Re:Why not fight back against the scumbags?

[GeekWithGuns]

I looked through my weblogs and noticed this crap in my logs, so I though about filling there log with a few hundred links to a picture that would properly express my feelings, but my wife convenced me otherwise. Since I was able to track the assholes down, I just emailed there ISP and ironicly the spammer assholes at there abuse address. Check out the nasty gram I shot off to them. I doubt it will make a diffrence, but it made me feel better.