404s from Pages With Adsense. IPs Originating in China.

[gouri]

For the past couple of weeks I have been receiving a lot of 404 messages in my traffic logs and the ip addresses where those 404s are originating are from China.

I also see that the page where the request originated is a page that is running adsense. Specifically, the file name that is resulting in the 404 messages is the following:

www.example.com/scripts/scripts/siteUtil.js

Can someone please tell me what may be causing this?

Is this an individual or some sort of bot? I am receiving 404s from these IPs for about two weeks straight.

Are they trying to receive adsense ads from the website servers instead of Google's adsense servers?

I would really appreciate your help on this.

[Lame_Wolf]

I did find this [webmasterworld.com ]
Have you tried Googling siteUtil.js It does bring up a few things. I am still reading them atm but popped in here with what I have found so far.

[gouri]

One thing that concerns me about this is that all the IP addresses for the 404 messages are going back to one place: China, and this has been happening eveyday for the past couple of weeks.

For this reason, I am trying to figure out what might be going on?

[Lame_Wolf]

It looks like it has something to do with "site manager" Do you use it on your site. (May be they stole some of your code and placed it on their site). Just guessing.

[jomaxx]

Is siteUtil.js a valid file on your site? Perhaps in the /scripts/ directory instead of the /scripts/scripts/ directory? There are scads of poorly-tested robots out there that are easily confused.

[gouri]

It looks like it has something to do with "site manager" Do you use it on your site. (May be they stole some of your code and placed it on their site). Just guessing.

Can you please tell me what "site manager" is?

Is it some sort of program and what is it supposed to do?

[gouri]

Is siteUtil.js a valid file on your site? Perhaps in the /scripts/ directory instead of the /scripts/scripts/ directory? There are scads of poorly-tested robots out there that are easily confused.

siteUtil.js is not a valid file on my site. I have html files (i.e. 101.html, 102.html, 103.html, 104.html). I don't believe that I have a /scripts directory on the site or a /scripts/scripts directory. The site only goes 1 directory level deep and the files are html files of the type I have mentioned.

The 404s from pages with Adsense continue to increase and they are coming from China. The failed page requests originated from http://www.example.com/ and http://www.example.com/scripts/siteutil.js

Maybe this info might help to determine what is causing these 404s.

I would appreciate if you guys could tell me what you think is going on?

[gouri]

I checked my server logs and I received more failed 404 errors and they were from China again.

The IPs were 124.115.4.204 and 124.115.0.170

and the ISP is CHINANET Shanxi(SN) province network.

I looked them up and did find a little information about them trying to attack websites.

From my end I don't think there is anything that I can do.

Has anyone else experienced attacks from the same company? I was hoping to see if I am the only one.

[jomaxx]

How many 404s are you actually getting? IMO it would take quite a few (thousands a day) to qualify as a deliberate or accidental "attack".

Have you banned the offending IP addresses/blocks?

Other than the fact that the referring page happens to have AdSense code on it, have you any reason to believe that AdSense is connected to this in any way?

[gouri]

I am getting less than 50 404s a day but it is something that has started suddenly and keeps continuing. Also, the site is small so for a small site this might be considered a lot.

If this is not considered some sort of "attack" can you please tell me what this could be?

I haven't banned the offending IP addresses/blocks because I don't have access to the root host file.

I think the Adsense code which is javascript might be something that is being targeted because I have heard that this code is something that bots use to reach a website.

[jomaxx]

I am getting less than 50 404s a day but it is something that has started suddenly and keeps continuing. Also, the site is small so for a small site this might be considered a lot.

Not insignificant, but you could have 100X that many, even 1,000X that many, without causing your server to even blink. (Unless they all came in one avalanche.)

If this is not considered some sort of "attack" can you please tell me what this could be?

As I said earlier, probably a confused robot. In my experience this is quite common. The robot's intention might be benign, or malevolent (harvesting email addresses, looking for servers with security holes), but either way the 404s aren't an issue.

I haven't banned the offending IP addresses/blocks because I don't have access to the root host file.

OK. If you can't use an .htaccess file to ban users and accomplish various other useful things, that's something you should look for next time.

I think the Adsense code which is javascript might be something that is being targeted because I have heard that this code is something that bots use to reach a website.

Not sure what this means. Of course Google's own AdSense crawler uses AdSense calls to identify pages to be crawled, but offhand I can't think how other spiders could use AdSense to reach a given page.

[gouri]

Can I alert the web hosting company about these IP addresses and do you think they can do something about this from their end (i.e. block the IP addresses)?