Attack of the click fraudsters

My site is under attack - next step?

[moishe]

Couple of days without internet access while moving into a new house so today I log in and start checking stats on my sites, to my HORROR I find that my number one referal link is from one of those "You click on me, I'll click on you" sites, actually from a PHP toolbar from that site.

Since I don't know how many of these referals have actually clicked links in the last few days, I don't know how bad the damage is but I am petrified.

Anyone faced this? What did you do? How did it turn out?

I am going to block the site now, but is the damage done?

M

[hunderdown]

Notifiy Google, the sooner the better.

[moishe]

Yep, gonna do that now. I am having trouble remembering how to block a url in my htaccess file, if I put deny http://www.example.com, I get a 500 error when trying to access my site, anyone have a code snippet for the htaccess to block a specific URL. I searched but am having trouble finding a clear answer.

Thanks,
M

[ianpurton]

RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

This will give out a 403 forbidden error.

[Khensu]

ianpurton

Thanks,

I logged that for future reference.

You just never know.

[TXGodzilla]

You can also deny the IP address with:

DENY FROM 64.193.62.5
or
DENY FROM 64.193.62 # server will match first 3 octets
DENY FROM 64.193.62.0/24 # block the entire class C (CIDR assignment)

IP range used as an example only.

[edited by: TXGodzilla at 7:52 pm (utc) on July 26, 2006]

[wmuser]

Never faced this but the first thing to do is to notify Google before its too late

[moishe]

Google notified, canned response received, site blocked, no more referals showing up so hopefully all is well:)