3 replies to this topic

[blackpool]

I saw this on my server stats today and wondered why someone would want to run searches like this on my website.

[Sun Mar 7 11:55:07 2004] [error] [client (ERASED IP)] File does not exist: home/public_html/personal_injury/new_york.html

Someone has put multiple searches for personal injury. The thing is I don't have any files named "personal_injury" or "new_york" or whatever. I have a hotel website in the UK!

I've erased the IP No. from the above but I had about FIFTEEN items like this in my logs all from the same IP Address. The intriguing thing was that two or three of the requests were in the same second!

I've never seen this before. Any ideas anyone?

blackpool

[qwerty]

I've got a guess... somebody's got a spider and a DB of URLs to crawl, and it looks like their database is corrupted. I've seen SE spiders get 404s when they try to go to something like /page.htm when that file exists at /directory/page.htm, and I've searched all over the place and there are no incorrect links to that file.

[blackpool]

Cheers qwerty

[Randy]

Yeah, I'd vote that it's a runaway spider too.

The ones I love from my error log are all of the folks trying to find an unsecure emailing script. The formmail perl script is really popular with the spammer-wanna-bees.

Then there are the folks looking to see if I have FrontPage extensions installed on my site so that they can try to hack it. I get a ton of those too. Likely because Frontpage is actually installed on the server, as they can see with a server info query. I don't use it on any of my sites though.

The really funny one has to do with my Subscription-based sites. People are forever trying to find a way to create a free username/password pair for themselves. Silly people... Even if they found the real user creation script it would error out unless they had exactly the correct parameters in the URL. Even if they somehow managed to get that right their "subscription" would last all of 5 minutes since I get an email notice whenever a new account is created.