Paul Jungwirth on 5 Apr 2018 08:53:59 -0700


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: [PLUG] More strange web traffic


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