Visitor stats and double crossing porn scammers and hackers

Ron Niebrugge Arizona, Photos, Travel 5 Comments

If you read my blog a couple of days ago, you will know I was happy to finally exceed 8,000 visitors in a single day.  Well today I took another peak at my stats and was shocked to see the following day I exceeded 10,000 visitors, and the day after that I exceeded 14,000 visitors!  As much as I would have liked to believe the world was finally discovering my photography, I knew these numbers were not realistic.  Internet growth happens very slowly. 

I had to figure out what was happening.  I poured over my logs and noticed I was getting a lot of Google traffic for very pornographic search terms.  I followed this back to Google and sure enough my site was ranking high for these terms.  The pages Google was linking to were not pages I recognized, but they were on my site.  When I clicked on the link, I was forwarded past my site to some actual porn site!

I did some more digging and it turns out there were 6 strange files on my server.  Apparently someone was able to hack onto my site and set this up.  I deleted the files, changed my password and contacted my hosting company.  They said they had another site with similar breaches, and have updated their firewall. 

So my 8,000 visitor day probably wasn’t legit.  I’m glad I was keeping an eye on my stats so I was able to catch it early.  I’m still getting lots of hits for those terms, which I really don’t like, so I got to thinking, if they can re-direct those pages, so can I.  So now those pages are redirected to the FBI’s website.  Not that the FBI will do anything, but it should get the attention of some web surfers!  If you can get past the dirty language, you can see an example here.  You will see my website wildnatureimages in the results part way down on the first page.  Clicking on it will take you to the FBI.  The same is true for a whole bunch of other pornographic terms as well. It will probably only work for a couple of days until Google updates the results and removes my website for those terms.

Note:  Don’t bother following the Google link, the redirect pages are no longer showing in the Google results.

Comments 5

  1. GEEZ!! And I thought you were a family-friendly site! Dirty old MILF’s?!?! Unbelieveable. Now we know the secret to you’re alexa ratings.

    You’re sick, Ron. Sick. Sick. Sick.

    (But I still like you.)

    🙂

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  3. Looks like we have similar interests, Ron. Just Kidding. 🙂

    I had an issue with some of those sites linking to my site two months ago, but I never found out why or how. It stopped last month though so I didn’t dig further. I hope that isn’t the reason why I have taken a hit on Google Images in the past week. None of my images have been showing up there recently.

  4. I can only sympathize. Last year, a newly discovered security hole in the
    subscription package was used by at least a dozen different malicous
    hackers trying to compromise the server. While some just erased files
    at random, others installed insidious software to be used for shady
    activities. Cleaning up the mess and preventing new intrusions took several days.

    However, a spike in traffic can happen for legitimate reasons. For instance, just a digg can easily result in tens of thousands of extra visitors in a day (and no, this doesn’t result in any business).

    Tuan.

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