are these really referer spam?

  • i’ve always got general referer spam coming into my logs, usually with pretty obvious urls that contain keywords like poker, viagra, etc, but recently i’ve been getting referers from many different wordpress installations that arn’t linking to my site but that don’t seem to be adversiting anything or dodgy in anyway. i’m quite confused to why this is happening. is there something in the world of referer spam that i’ve missed in the last couple of weeks? i use bbclone for logging all referers to my site but will be installing a referer spam plugin for my wp install this evening.

    https://milkmiruku.com/bbclone/show_detailed.php?lng=en

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • youre getting exactly whats already been reported in this thread:

    https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/33646

    I see you were hit by alexking.org too ?? Welcome to the club!

    Could this be an exploitation of the 1.5 security thing – somehow highjacking the file to send legit sounding referrers?
    Not scare-mongering here, just thinking out loud.

    im guessing its been silently hypothesiszed, however, I checked every site I got hits from and they were not all runing 1.5.. so that theory is dead in the water for me. However, again, IF the security thing that exists in 1.5 existed in 1.2.* … hmm, knowing what it is, its hard for me to see how that could be the cause of it.

    Also, the “security thing” isnt something that would cause non-descript hits like that in server logs either. They would have stood out to me — these are just plain old hits from WP blogs that dont really link to you ??

    /me runs off to scour through all the files looking for secret ping sender embedded by rogue WP developer.

    Just as a note, referrer-karma seemed to plug the leak for me. It’s the only approach or plug-in that had any effect whatsoever.

    So, it seems that whatever it does gets to the core of the problem.

    There… that’s my informed tech speak for the morning.

    I’m so proud.

    And I got a “referral” from rathergate.com, the recently very popular anti-MSM site. Sadly, they didn’t link to me either (or not so sadly since I really am happy not to wade into the morasse of media contemplation) but I did notice he recently updated to a WP format.

    Could this be a problem not in 1.5.1 sending out pings, but in picking them up? I never had this happen until I updated to the most recent version.

    Never mind, got some more of the same today.

    Just as a note, referrer-karma seemed to plug the leak for me.

    Never mind ..

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/ [R=301,L]

    I have nothing but respect for the people that write all of the plugins for WP, however, until the spam plugins are up to speed with this, this IS what works.

    Its 2 whole lines.

    Put it in the other day, after your post on the related thread. I’m always wary about doing .htaccess stuff because I have thought I was following instructions before, then had my whole site shut down with errors until I erased what I thought I was doing.

    So, I finally took to heart your plugin free philosophy and tried it out. Sorry to be a bit of a bother. I very, very much appreciate the help.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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