If you’re a current website owner who has access to or frequently reviews site usage logs or statistics you might be wondering why so many people in Russia or The Ukraine are so interested in your site. You might even notice that some of them are actually linking to you.
Well, don’t feel flattered! It’s usually referral spam a scheme used by hackers to generate free backlinks to their site – especially if your site is not correctly locked down.
In one recent month an estimated 60% of the traffic on one major service provider was attributed to individuals or more likely botnets attempting to break into business websites. The reason is that about 5% of the websites in the US can be broken into with 10 or fewer guesses at passwords! So do the math – testing every website in the world 10 times or 100 times generates lots of targets – and massive amounts of wasted network resources and administration effort.
We go to unusual lengths to keep our sites secure. The most time consuming one is that we manually review logs to look for patterns that no automated tool can find. We’ve been doing it for a long time and have even been asked to help in forensic investigations into email hacking for the authorities.
We are constantly reviewing suspicious activity and locking out networks that could cause deliberate or accidental harm to our clients.