Already, there is hacker activity on this blog again. Should the blog suddenly behave oddly, you will know why. Already this blog has had more visits than it often gets in a whole day. Bots I suspect.
I see another of my blogs also has high visitor numbers.
Usually they look every month, then play their nasty games elsewhere. It always comes from the same sources. I see high numbers, check the map, and I know it is hackers rather than genuine visits.
I "fixed" this on my blog by removing it from search engines. It's a somewhat drastic step, but it works. Look at the blogger settings, under Basic and Privacy if you want to change this.
ReplyDeleteIt's not really hacking; it's "scraping". These bots are going over sites ("crawling") to pick up fragments of content, which they then re-assemble into pages of nonsense mish-mash to lure people drawn by search results.
For example, someone may search for "windmill". They will click on a result and find a page loaded with ads (and malicious tracking cookies) that has *bits of your writing* about the windmill museum mixed in with gibberish taken from other sites. The "hackers" just made money from the ad view, plus they will make more money from selling the tracking data.
In order for this to work, the "hackers" need *actual content* to fool the search engine into presenting the gibberish page as a legitimate site. Blogs are excellent sources for the crawlers. Disabling crawling shuts them out, as there is plenty of other low-hanging fruit for them. But it also means that people won't come across your blog in search results. So consider carefully.
- KD0TLS Todd
Thanks for this tip Todd. I'll try it.
ReplyDelete