Strange Traffic on my Webserver

[robando]

I run a small website out of my home office which I just use a portfolio of my work. After racking my brain for a few hours as to why my internet connection was so slow I finally checked my server logs and realized that i'm getting bombarded with strange requests to my Apache 1.x web server. Rather than seeing requests to data on my local server I'm seeing requests to absolute urls. Here's a snippet from my access log.

72.232.49.146 - - [13/Dec/2006:23:44:20 -0800] "GET [search.live.com...] HTTP/1.1" 206 21394 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"
72.232.48.194 - - [13/Dec/2006:23:44:20 -0800] "GET [search.live.com...] HTTP/1.1" 206 26512 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"
72.232.48.194 - - [13/Dec/2006:23:44:20 -0800] "GET [forgen.nl...] HTTP/1.1" 200 8303 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"
72.36.230.66 - - [13/Dec/2006:23:44:21 -0800] "GET [search.live.com...] HTTP/1.1" 206 21579 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"
72.232.49.146 - - [13/Dec/2006:23:44:22 -0800] "GET [amnesty.eusa.ed.ac.uk...] HTTP/1.1" 200 23007 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"
72.232.45.242 - - [13/Dec/2006:23:44:23 -0800] "GET [search.live.com...] HTTP/1.1" 206 23077 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"
72.232.233.18 - - [13/Dec/2006:23:44:24 -0800] "GET [search.live.com...] HTTP/1.1" 206 20087 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"
72.36.230.66 - - [13/Dec/2006:23:44:24 -0800] "GET [kamille0.cafe24.com...] HTTP/1.1" 200 164250 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"
72.36.230.66 - - [13/Dec/2006:23:44:25 -0800] "GET [search.live.com...] HTTP/1.1" 206 18304 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"
72.232.48.194 - - [13/Dec/2006:23:44:25 -0800] "GET [centrebike.org...] HTTP/1.1" 200 9739 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"
63.219.148.194 - - [13/Dec/2006:23:44:26 -0800] "GET [search.live.com...] HTTP/1.1" 206 25924 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"

What I'm wondering is if I'm being used as a proxy server by somebody? I want this traffic to go away and aleviate my bandwidth issues. I've been lurking here and realize that you guys know a whole lot more about this stuff than me...can somebody please help me out?

thank you!

--rO
[robando.net...]

[robando]

btw...i read this post

[webmasterworld.com...]

and it seems that's the issue i'm having but I really don't know enough about mod_rewrite to completely understand how to impliment. I attempted to put that code in my http.conf file in the <Directory "/var/www/html"> section but that didn't seem to work. It should be noted that I do use my site as an extranet for clients so I have a whole lot of subdomains I'm using which have files living in different directories. Hopefully this will help somebody point me in the right direction.

thanks in advance!

--rO