Referrer Log Spam

I’ve been curi­ous about this for a while, watch­ing my refer­rer logs (where vis­i­tors are com­ing from) fill up with appar­ent refer­rals from site with obvi­ous spam­mer domains–I won’t use the words, we all know them. These sites should have no inter­est in refer­ring to my sites. What does a gam­bling site want with QuarkVSInDesign​.com? Why would a porn site send 500 peo­ple a month to The Design Weblog? Why would a site adver­tis­ing the hair-growth med­ica­tion Rogaine link to I Am Pariah​.com? Granted, I’m not only a client of the Long-Hair Club for Men, I’m also the pres­i­dent, but still…

When I found this, it all made sense.

The spam­mer writes a script to trawl through a list of URLs (some­thing like the home page of weblogs​.com is ide­al) and per­forms an HTTP GET on each site, set­ting the address of their own site in the refer­rer head­er. This results in an entry in the site’s access logs show­ing that, appar­ent­ly, the spammer’s site is link­ing to you. Of course, when the own­er of a site goes through and clicks to see who’s link­ing to them, they’re dri­ven direct­ly to the spammer’s site. Often, they’ll reg­is­ter inter­est­ing sound­ing domain names to throw you off the scent – but of course they all point to the same place.

From All In The Head

The U.S. Congress, Federal Communications Commission, and sim­i­lar bod­ies in oth­er coun­tries are slothe­ful­ly hes­i­tant to do any­thing about unso­licit­ed advertisements–spam–of any form. Just last year the first step laws were passed. When will we see the next one? When will we actu­al­ly see the enforce­ment of anti-spam leg­is­la­tion beyond a few token pros­e­cu­tions that take down the easy-to-find spam­mers while leav­ing the real cul­prits alone?

China, they say, is tol­er­ant of spam­mers, allow­ing the largest such crim­i­nals to use Chinese hosters with­out restric­tion. I say, they U.S. is lax on spam.

Spam, in all its var­ied forms, costs con­sumers and cor­po­ra­tions bil­lions each year. When will our gov­ern­ments begin actu­al­ly rep­re­sent­ing us, we the peo­ple? When will they actu­al­ly do their jobs?