Forum Moderators: phranque
I read on Webmasterworld that this may be the work of sql hackers, listing websites they want to hack in the future....? I have a very good inkling that once one of their sites is shut down, the rest will follow. What are the steps to report to the isp of the offending websites? Any actual URls to find the information are very welcome indeed!
What is the best way to approach this annoying, harmful attack? Wish I could report this attacker to some internet cop. In the meantime, I will go ahead and add these new sites to sites not allowed to visit my computer (please do not visit these attack sites):
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Obviously this attempt to dilute the overall strength of my targetted keywords has to stop, and soon--- with a little help from ya'll...Thanks!
[edited by: incrediBILL at 5:43 pm (utc) on Aug. 19, 2008]
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The sites that contain this malware are scraper sites that download content from many sites and scramble it into incoherent pages and generate tons of spam designed to attract people to their sites to be infected and become part of their botnet.
Report these sites to Google in their Webmaster Central for spam reports.
Additionally, if you know where the sites are hosted, writing to the hosting company can get this type of site removed for AUP violations.
The safest way to avoid being infected by these sites is to surf the web with a Firefox add-on called NoScript which pretty much eliminates the threat unless you manually enable scripts to run on those sites.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 5:53 pm (utc) on Aug. 19, 2008]
What you are describing sounds like it took someone a lot of time to set up and I doubt they picked a host that would care to hear your complaint.
Most times in this situation writing to the ISP is a waste of time
That's just bad advice because everyone doing nothing means nothing is ever done.
When my site was under attack by botnets about 80% of the hosts I contacted acted on the problem but most were US and Canadian based that I contacted.
What you are describing sounds like it took someone a lot of time to set up and I doubt they picked a host that would care to hear your complaint.
Actually it takes very little time to create thousands of accounts with the scraper scripts that just dump out junk endlessly in "burn and churn accounts".
The bigger operations that don't tend to go away are hosted in a few countries that are notorious for such things, but if it's not hosted in those countries you have a decent shots at eliminating them.
Anyway, after reporting a few of these things you get a quick idea of which hosts will act and which ones are a waste of time so it's easy enough to focus on those that care in the future and the Google spam report will hopefully stop others from encountering the sites in the first place.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 6:54 pm (utc) on Aug. 19, 2008]
I report every one of them, except for those that originate from "shady" countries.
Each and every IP earns a spot in my filters, as well. If it's from a country I don't work with, the entire block gets snipped.
