Re: [PLUG] More strange web traffic

[prushik <prushik@gmail.com>]

I would wonder if it was an attempt to hide something like XSRF attacks. Not sure if that makes sense, but that was my first thought.

Sent from my Samsung device.

 

---- Original message ----
From: Paul Jungwirth <pj@illuminatedcomputing.com>
Sent: 04/05/2018 11:54:01
To: plug@lists.phillylinux.org
Subject: 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
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___________________________________________________________________________
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Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
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