Re: [PLUG] More strange web traffic

[Paul Jungwirth <pj@illuminatedcomputing.com>]

On 04/05/2018 08:19 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 11:06 AM, Paul Jungwirth
> <pj@illuminatedcomputing.com> wrote:
> > Almost all the requests had Chinese-sounding domain names (so not Russians
> > ;-) and seemed shopping-related. It didn't look like the usual scanning for
> > /unpatched.php or whatever, but seemed to serve some other purpose. But
> > what? (Note I was not actually proxying the requests, just responding with a
> > 301.)
>
> I wonder if it was price scraping.  Suppose I want to maintain a
> database of all of Amazon's prices?  Suppose Amazon doesn't want me
> maintaining that database?  A cat and mouse game ensues, and open
> proxies would likely become pawns.

That makes sense. I guess because I was sending a 301, which many http 
libraries/tools would automatically follow, from the scraper's 
perspective it would still appear to "work" (just unproxied), so it 
would be an easy-to-overlook bug for them to add my site to their list 
of open proxies. Interesting!

--
Paul              ~{:-)
pj@illuminatedcomputing.com
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug