The Bulgarians are avoiding some of us?
Several bloggers have reported that they haven’t received any more referrer spam from the Bulgarians. Same here. Last time stamp from my log is:
[26/Feb/2005:22:21:20 -0600]
Would like to hear from anyone receiving hits from them since that time. And what’s served? What we do know, is that they’re keeping us under observation. That means my blog, and any blog linked from it. Both blogroll and links in posts.
Mediasushi reports an access with this time stamp:
[28/Feb/2005:05:17:29 +0800]
The same IP number was used by a human a little later to surf her site. She was wondering if that’s the spammer checking out her site? It could have been a very on the ball admin checking out what people are using his site for. Except… This person was coming in to her blog through a link from mine!
Can’t find that IP number in my logs, though. Not even close. I’m missing a bit of log (my host didn’t set up the logs the way I asked yet, and I forgot to bug him), but if her time stamp is correct, I have the log from that time frame. So unless he left his computer for a few hours, or had it in the cache and then came back, it’s a mystery how this happened.
I did get word from a few of the regulars here, who have blogs not visibly connected to our efforts. He got this new domain in his logs:
highprofitclub dot com
Typical Bulgarian whois info. I can’t access the site in any way, but it looks as though it used to be online (check out http://www.whois.sc/). -The design looks a bit unusual for the Bulgarians. Probably a site they’ve bought.
Ah, yes. If the Bulgarians own it now, then it’s definitely something they’ve bought off someone else. It was a pyramid/MLM scheme with gambling. Similar to World Games, which reportedly made it big in Norway. Well, before it collapsed and Økokrim (Economic Crimes - law enforcement agency) got involved. So it’s very possible another such endeavor folded, and the Bulgarians may have bought it cheaply. It will at least have name recognition. But if they spamvertize it, they WILL be reported to Google, and if past history is anything to go by, Google WILL blacklist the domain name…
UPDATE: One of the members of High Profit Club came by the site last week to check on the share prices. Today the site was gone. He has no idea what happened, since his sponsor quit the program (which basically means that unless he knows people higher up, he has no way of getting hold of any info).
February 28th, 2005 at 12:20 pm
I’m still getting hits from isacommie and musicbox1 - but it’s only triggering 403’s for them so I really have to go hunting to find them. Yahoo slurp is REALLY annoying me right now as it’s ignoring robots and is all over my logs so it’s gong to get banned because at the moment it is the main cause of difficulty in reading my raw logs…worse than the spammers…
February 28th, 2005 at 12:22 pm
Ah, but if you download your logs and use TextHarvest, you can just filter it out. And you can filter for the 403’s as well. I wrote a post on that earlier, back on annelisabeth.com
February 28th, 2005 at 12:22 pm
Oh and the automated hits for rooody as well…once a day
February 28th, 2005 at 1:34 pm
I just pull my raw logs throgh FTP and then run through them with ‘find all’ with BBedit. It’s just that Slurp is from Yahoo and you’d think they’d respect robots…but they aren’t and it’s literally everywhere. I like to give my logs a quick read through to see if anything unusual stands ot…but slurp is all I’m seeing.
They’re going to ge banned
February 28th, 2005 at 1:48 pm
If you don’t want to be in Yahoo, I suppose that’s up to you… But if you change your habits a little bit, then there’s no need to ban them.
Oh wait, you’re on a Mac, aren’t you… Quick, a grep type app for the Mac. Anyone?
February 28th, 2005 at 2:11 pm
I just don’t think the amount of crawling slurp does is justified. But Yahoo has always left a bad taste in my mouth. If I tell it in robots.txt to not go trawling all over then it needs to respect that…it hasn’t so that gets a bot banned no matter who it is.
I’d use grep if I wreally needed to
Remember OS X is nix based. But I have my workflow running nicely with BBedit. I don’t like to live in the terminal too much 
March 1st, 2005 at 10:27 am
That’s interesting that you don’t see that IP in your logs. I am 8 hrs ahead of GMT so maybe look at the day before?
March 3rd, 2005 at 5:48 pm
This referrer spam pyramid is driving me nuts. After banning several variations on domains with poker in their name, I finally have these jerks at highprofitclub dot com showing up in my server logs ALL THE TIME. I can’t ban them because the IP doesn’t resolve. If you have any help, please let me know.
March 4th, 2005 at 5:00 am
Ginrai: How about you ban the domain name itself in .htaccess? That works.