By Jofaba on

Forgive my naivite but I'm still learning my way through the Drupal software and I just got approved for Adsense yesterday and figured out how to get it installed this morning around 3am. Almost immediately, I saw someone or something (bot?) trying to access "edit/user/1/Adverts". Now, as far as I know my site's secure but I'm still testing out different modules as well as trying to get some member only functions (like a forum for example) in, and then open up a membership process, but since I'm very new to CMS's in general and Adsense specifically, I'm just worried that I have a security hole and it's so telltale that some not-so-friendly bot saw it and is trying to access my Adsense account information. The main reason it bothers me is because when I clicked on what is trying to be accessed, it's my Google Adsense Client ID. I'm not sure how private that is supposed to remain, or what could happen if someone got ahold of it (it's not like I've even made a penny yet, or even will in any time soon) but I don't want to get myself on bad terms with Google on my first day.

Maybe something worth mentioning is that my pageviews yesterday grew by 600% while my unique visitor count did not. I noticed this prior to getting my Adsense approval. Also, Google has not yet indexed my site. I'm not sure if adding Adsense has alerted Google to my site but it's been very picky with my non-clean urls. But last night my ads were mostly programming language targeted and now they're almost exclusively videogame targed (a large aspect of what my site caters to).

I'm not sure if I'm asking for trouble by suggesting this, but if this sounds curious to a more knowledged person and you want to take a look at my site for security holes I'd appreciate it. Or at the very least if you could share why an annonymous user is trying to access my user account then you'd relieve some of my worries.

Thanks as always for the community support,
JFBartalomy

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

mitomac’s picture

mitomac commented

Hi Jofaba,

Anytime a new page with adsense code is accessed, google immediately sends the adsense mediabot to your site to get that page's content (sometimes multiple times). So the frequency of bot hits goes up substantially upon adding the adsense code. Also, you google_id is visible in the source html on any page that has google adsense. This is just a fact and there is nothing you can do about it. I guess if someone steals your adsense_id you would get credit for their ads -- so it is not so bad.

Hope this helps,

mitomac

Boinng’s picture

Boinng commented

This may or may not make you feel any better, but your Adsense ID is effectively public anyway, since it's contained in the urls Google uses to provide ads and track click throughs, and can be readily found in the page source of any Adsense site (Drupal or otherwise). I think the worst thing anyone could do with it, probably, is display some ads on your behalf, and earn you some extra money ;)