MSN fakes referrers

[SEOPTI]

This has been discussed in 2007:
[webmasterworld.com...]

They do it again, I see hundreds of fake visitors from MSN IPs across all of my domains.

Are there any news what they try to accomplish by doing this?

[Ocean10000]

New version of the Referrer spam bot using invalid IE User-Agent Strings coming from 65.55.165.*

Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;++MSIE+6.0;++Windows+ NT+5.2;++SV1;+ +.NET+CLR+1.1.4325;++.NET+CLR+2.0.40607;++.NET+CLR+3.0.04506.648)
Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;++MSIE+6.0;++Windows+ NT+5.1;++SV1;+ +.NET+CLR+1.1.4325;++.NET+CLR+2.0.50727;++.NET+CLR+3.0.04506.648)
Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;++MSIE+6.0;++Windows+ NT+5.1;++SV1;+ +.NET+CLR+1.1.4322;++.NET+CLR+2.0.40607;++.NET+CLR+3.0.30729;++.NET+CLR+3.5.30707)

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 12:50 pm (utc) on Jan. 12, 2010]
[edit reason] (fixed formatting) added space before NT [/edit]

[wilderness]

I'm sure the forum is going to butcher these trailing blank spaces, however there are TWO trailing blank spaces after every phrase/section of the UA (excluding the end).

65.55.165.107 - - [18/Aug/2009:18:50:01 +0100] "GET /myFolder/myPage.html HTTP/1.1" 403 1159 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SLCC1; .NET CLR 1.1.4325; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)"

[rehabguy]

I'm recieveing over 10,000 visits from the Bing spoof bot on a daily basis...

[smokeybarnable]

yeah this is annoying. They claimed they "fixed" it in this thread:

[bing.com...]

I wonder what this is really all about. It almost seems like they are crawling their own search engine.

[1EightT]

They are probably trying to see if sites generate a page on the fly based on the incoming referrer. I know they discuss that as a method for spam detection in some of their research papers.

[dstiles]

Well, it works here. They get a 403 page. :)

[Disco Legend Zeke]

Bing is late to the dance, so they seem to be a little hyper.

On the other hand, they seem very willing to act on complaints, for example i was #2 behind a completely blank page, and within a week of complaining, i was promoted to #1

if the re-searches are actually from BING, and are for spam recognition, then i think it is working. Also, by faking user agents, they may defeat some spam tools such as cloaking.

As for non-msn referrals looking for phone numbers, you probably had the same searches in google, but so spread out over time (as the phonelist scrapers came on line) that you didn't notice.

The surge of all traffic from BING, including scrapers and other junk, could be explained by the success of their advertising and marketing campaigns.

[wilderness]

As for non-msn referrals looking for phone numbers, you probably had the same searches in google, but so spread out over time (as the phonelist scrapers came on line) that you didn't notice.

Many thanks for the tip on how to read our logs ;)

[blend27]

-- success of their advertising and marketing campaigns --

If you'd call it a marketing campaign, they truly deserve the 403, JUST for trying out new and exciting things ;)

-- they may defeat some spam tools such as cloaking --

truly, people that use cloaking to spam already know where it comes from simply by matching IP to the well known ranges, seriously .... my cat knows those IP Ranges...

THIS Tread should be renamed to: NO RESPONSE TO WEBMASTERS CONCERNS or NO CASH for WASTED Bandwidth.

[sidney1310]

It looks like they finally took care of it. See the August 28 posting from Brett Yount in this thread

[bing.com...]

I haven't seen any more of these hits in my access logs since August 27.

[Pfui]

On 09-02, I moved a site onto our server (temp placement; the owner's changing boxes). Within 36 hours of DNS broadcast, MSN's bots hit it scores and scores of times via 65.55 servers using faked referers and cloaked browsers. E.g.:

msnbot-65-55-104-68.search.msn.com
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; SLCC1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30707; InfoPath.2)

msnbot-65-55-104-65.search.msn.com
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; SLCC1; .NET CLR 1.1.4325; .NET CLR 2.0.40607; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; MS-RTC LM 8)

msnbot-65-55-165-44.search.msn.com
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; SLCC1; .NET CLR 1.1.4325; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)

msnbot-65-55-165-46.search.msn.com
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4325; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648)

Yesterday (09-05) saw more hits from MSN's faked referers than from any other host, all having to do with common words per usual. Also per usual, the cloaked+fake MSN bots are strangers to robots.txt.

In short: Same old, same old.