. . . muttered the ogre

Some of you are familiar with referral spam. The spammer issues HTTP requests for pages of yours, giving the advertiser’s address as the source of the link; you look at your HTTP log and say to yourself “whoopee, there’s a link to my site from someone I didn’t know about; what do they say about me?”; you look up their site and find that it sells, let’s say, referral-spam services.

Now I see a change. Previous referral spam has usually been from domains with cryptic names, hitting many different pages; they were easy to spot and ignore. The latest batch has a hundred different domains with clear names like application-card-credit-4u.info, each hitting three or fewer of my pages. I have not bothered to see how many different hands are behind these various finger-puppets.

It’s a much worse nuisance than before; finding seeds among chaff is harder than ignoring chaff among seeds.