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A Referrer Spam Anecdote

While I was going the logs for this website today, I noticed an interesting anomaly. One of the top ten links from an external page was a particularly shady website, http://www.bloggingtothebank.com/, which obviously did not contain a link to here. Looking into things a little deeper, I learned that so-called referrer spam is quite prevalent. In most cases, spammers will continuously hit well-known websites that publish their log statistics to inflate their page rank. This makes sense. However, what I noticed today was much more clever and insiduous. The logs from straightsectalk.com aren’t published anywhere. The spammer was actually targeting me - the owner of a blog website. Very clever. What will spammers do next?

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “A Referrer Spam Anecdote”

  1. Jericho Says:
    July 28th, 2008 at 4:05 am

    How do you know they were specifically targeting you? Spam, be it e-mail, referer or another style, typically operates and gains success due to saturation. Instead of some spammer thinking “i’ll target kevin’s blog with this domain”, they target tens of thousands of domains in hopes the admin checks the site out of curiosity, or in case they make their logs available in some fashion.

    If you get web hits from an RFI botnet looking to exploit /some/page/that/doesnt/exist.php?url=http://badsite.com/, do you think they are specifically targeting you?

  2. Kevin Borders Says:
    July 28th, 2008 at 7:49 am

    Hi Jericho, I wasn’t referring to “me” in the individual sense, but rather “me as a blog owner.” I am sure the spammers targeted everyone whose blogs they could find.

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