[mdlug] The joys of site proprietorship

[gib at juno.com]

I'd like to learn more about developing for Android.

---------- Original Message ----------
From: "Ingles, Raymond" <Raymond.Ingles at compuware.com>
To: "mdlug at mdlug.org" <mdlug at mdlug.org>
Subject: [mdlug] The joys of site proprietorship
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2014 13:52:15 +0000

Running the site for the Android app I wrote, it's been going fine for a few months. Now some stupid bot in Russia found it. It's not hacking anything, it's just hitting my site with fake "referer" tags, lots of different ones but 90% from the '.ru' domain. Which is a waste of time since my logs aren't visible, but the bot doesn't care. It fills up my logs with fake traffic, making it hard to figure out where actual referrals are coming from.

It uses several different IPs, so I had to hack up my .htaccess file to block them.

I've only had a handful of sales from Russia anyway, so I block all .ru referrers with:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.biz [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.ru [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.cn [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

(Google play doesn't sell in China anyway, and I've never seen anything useful come from .biz, so I block those too.)

I added a few specific ones that aren't .ru or .biz, and then, since I was doing it anyway, I added a bunch of stuff from https://www.addedbytes.com/blog/block-referrer-spam/

I can test it with something simple like:

wget --referer http://weeble.biz [my site's url]

If the .htaccess file is working, I get "403 Forbidden" as a result.

(Note, the actual word is spelled 'referrer', but the HTTP standard misspells it "referer".)

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