strange referer

referer

[TheWebographer]

I keep track of HTTP_REFERER 's on a real time basis. Its fun and informative to take a look every so often and see from where people are coming to visit the website.

Recently there was huge influx of these, something like 5 per second for a couple of minutes:

[www%2eOURSITENAME%2ecom...]

The OURSITENAME portion is our domain, the rest (including the little "e" and the "ecom" part is not part of our website or domain. Each time they went directly to our homepage.

Any ideas from whence this visitor is coming from? It would seem to me it is some kind of bot, but is it malicious?

Thanks in advance.

[jdMorgan]

TheWebographer,

%2e is the encoding for a period.

Whether it is malicious or not depends on what it does on your site, and to a certain extent, your preferences.
Did it check robots.txt?
If so, did it obey robots.txt?
What was the user-agent?
What IP address did it come from?
Does that IP address resolve to a corporation, or a DSL or dial-up provider?

Take a look at your raw logs, using the time-stamp as a correlator, and see if you can find out the answers to the above. With tha %2e stuff in there, it could just be an AOL user. Or maybe not.

Jim