Strange website visitors

I got some great help on my last question and I am hoping someone can help with this situation.

I have had my website for about a year now and it has a summary page with information and statistics about visitors. It tells the IP address, the browser/platform and sometimes the referring website. Usually the visitors come from places like NPN and other nature and photo sites that I frequent but I am also noticing quite a few hits from Russia. Today I received some visits from ogosexshop.com/ua which looks to be a russian sex shop site. I have also received referrals from a Russian bride website. Most of the time I don't click on the links to see what the sites are about so I don't know if I have had others such visitors.

Has anyone else had this kind of traffic visiting their website. Is there something weird going on here or is this stuff just typical of the internet? If anyone can enligten me I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

Robert Bunch

I get a lot of traffic to my blog from Russia. I have no idea....

These may be malicious sites trying to install malware on the server. Contact your server administrator and ask if they can block these addresses. You may also be able to block them yourself in the admin control panel for your site.

Don't click on any of the links! If you have, I suggest you run a malware scan on your computer using either MalwareBytes or AdAware (both free).

--P

I have had some really strange comments in my guest book lately, but just delete them ASAP. Don't click any links as Preston wisely states. They all have suspicious links.... so ignore and delete is the best policy.

I've had some odd ones, too, including a grammatically awkward post singing the praises of Marc Adamus, riddled with typos, inviting me to click on a link to visit Marc's site. It was signed by someone called "Ping Pong." I don't think the comment was from Marc. And I did not click on the link, which offered a URL with an .ru suffix.

The Intertubes are a dangerous place. Use caution, folks.

Most of the time these are bots set out by spammers and hackers. For the hackers they are looking for holes in scripts that are behind forms that can give them access to the server. For spammers they are getting email addresses to start out sending spam.

And you are correct in not clicking on the links.

If your hosting service allows you to upload your own form script (typically cgi) you can "harden" the script to keep the bad guys (both spammers and hackers) out. In my days as a web techie I used tectite.com .

If you can't upload your own script see if your hosting company allows you to put a captcha on your form. That's the little box you have to enter a displayed code in for someone to submit your form. It will keep out software bots but not actual humans.

Monitoring your stats is a great way to see who is visiting and if your site has made it to the "hit" list. And also if and when the search engine bots visit. If there are IP addresses you can do reverse lookups, etc..

The saying "be safe out there" certainly applies to web sites!

Thanks again to everyone for your replies. I did a little web research and learned about some of the threats out there. I have McAfee protection and I ran a scan and everything is supposedly OK but I think I will add some more protection such as MalwareBytes etc. and read up on the threats out there. Don't want my computer to become a zombie!

Robert,

MalWareBytes is excellent. You do not want to have two virus/malware programs actively scanning at the same time, since conflicts may occur, and system resources will also be more heavily used. So, once you install MalWareBytes., set for a on-demand manual scan.

McAfee is pretty good, but like Symantec products, I found it be pretty resource-heavy. I am currently using Bit Defender, which gets very high marks.

--P

Preston,

Thanks again for all your helpful input on this subject.

Robert Bunch