[svlug] Web statistics

[Don Marti]

begin Tony Hartzell quotation of Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 11:58:57PM -0700:

> I saw that these traffic analyzers looked at apache's log file. I
> checked out /var/log/apache/apache.log and in about 36 hours it's about
> 3.3MB and filled with entries like I've included in inc.txt...I think I
> should be worried. Can anyone advise?

It's called "referer spam."  Spammers hope that
you'll put your web stats up publicly, including
your top HTTP Referers, and thereby give them some
Google juice.

It seems to work often enough to get them to keep
doing it.

The most important countermeasure is to make sure
that any stat pages where a referer might show up are
either not public or at least blocked by robots.txt

I'm working on a script that webmasters can use to
clean referer spam out of Apache log files.  Anyone
who wants to try it can send me mail off-list and I'll
let you know when it's up.

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org