Sunday, September 11th, 2005, 3:08 pm
Error Log Spam
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NE wonders if error logs of Web sites could become the next target for spammers. Webmaster already suffer from comment spam, unrouted E-mail spam, and referrer spam.
Fortunately, error log spam appears to in its diapers. I believe it is only a matter of time before it becomes a serious plague. Below are some thoughts, all of which were sparked in recent discussions in nntp://alt.www.webmaster after we had observed odd yet identical errors in our logs.
Many requests appear to come from Seoul, seeking a file called robotsxx.txt, a variation of the usual robots.txt, which is fully-standardised. Upon closer inspection, it looked like this was related to ‘adult’ material. The IP address seems to have been associated with pornographic content.
To stress the danger of such requests becoming commonplace, our error logs could soon be accommodated with requests like:
GET /enlarge_YOUR_log_www.bigbeef.com HTTP/1.1
(funny example from Alan)
It is worryingly easy to automate such requests and spam the entire World Wide Web en masse, leaving such invalid requests for tens of millions of Webmasters to see. Will there soon be filters for site referrers and error logs too? Let us hope we need not go down that route.
