Hello, I've noticed that several URL links are referenced via my statistics software that concern me. Particularly, since they're all external to my website, I'm curious why my web server is referencing them as local hits.

In particular, I'm worried because the links are all banner ads or similar, which have no business being on my website. I think maybe it's SPAM in my system somehow?

In any case, the two URLs of concern are:

To try and track down what was happening, I dumped my entire database ('mysqldump -p -u drupal drupal > /tmp/drupal.txt') and then searched through it for the offending strings (eg "linksynergy" and "clickxchange"). I found them in the Cache tables, as CID arguments.

I thought that the Cache table was supposed to be local pages to my system?

Any help in understanding why the *#%#* these might be showing up in the cache table would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Comments

shane’s picture

FYI - when I dumped my entire Drupal database, I only found references to the domains listed above in the Cache table, they did NOT exist in any other location (eg in nodes, pages, books, events, or weblinks).

shane’s picture

I'm also seeing:

218.150.163.30 - - [04/Jan/2005:16:04:04 -0800] "GET http://www.compare-online.co.uk/misc/logos/khs-logo.jpg HTTP/1.0" 200 2998 "http://www.compare-online.co.uk/Travel-5114/Travel.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.02; Windows 98)"

In my Apache logs, which doesn't make sense. Since my site is www.pdxadventureracer.com - and there are no KNOWN links to the compare-online site anywhere in my content. The interesting thing is that the "/misc/logos/khs-logo.jpg" path/filename portion tacked on the end of the compare-online URL is local to my system - and doesn't exist on the remote site.

Any thoughts out there regarding this? Is this SPAM somehow being embedded in my Drupal site? I can't find any references to these sites (other than in the Cache table) in my database...

Thanks in advance for any and all input...

robertDouglass’s picture

Any new info on this Shane?

- Robert Douglass

-----
www.robshouse.net
www.webs4.com

shane’s picture

No new info - I assume (as Steven) mentions - that it's spam-f*&kers trying to get better search engine rankings.

Steven’s picture

These are spammers who are trying to get mentioned in your web site's statistics. If the statistics are public, and crawled by search engines, then that would mean a better search engine ranking.

They'll try anything these days...

--
If you have a problem, please search before posting a question.

videojunky’s picture

Wow.
People like that deserve to be locked up.
If it becomes a bigger problem you should get a common spammers list or something to ban those potential dangers.

IMO I think spamming offenses that have proof of malicious action such as this should have bigger punishments than just a $fine or couple months jail time. Ethier that or everyone should be allowed to attack such spammers with the common goal to critically wound their operations in hopes of a cleaner internet.