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Malicious Attack on My Campaigns? (7)

11-25-2019 03:49 PM #1 sushiparlour (Member)
Malicious Attack on My Campaigns?

I'm suddenly seeing someone enter my traffic with links like this:

http://MYTRACKERURL.com/?siteid=aa1aaaa&subid=1aaa1aaaa1aaaaa&campaign=111 111&bid=1.1111&conversion=1aaa1aaaa11

The token information are all set up with identical parameters like the above and this actually messes up my stats since my cost is now skewed (I'm not bidding anywhere near 1.111 since I run on push traffic). I suspect this could be someone that got hold of my camps via spytools or other means and just maliciously having a bot mess with my stats so that I would pause my campaigns. I nearly wouldn't have noticed it if not because of the fact that I had a lot of my paused camps end up with an identical negative number for profit (and it all came from the same traffic source).

Want to see if anyone has seen something similar or is there another explanation for this that I am missing? Maybe like a spytool crawling my links (but why would it change the default bids and other token values)?

Now that I caught this I can probably code/figure out a prevention but just extra work that really isn't needed ugh..

11-25-2019 08:06 PM #2 matuloo (Legendary Moderator)

Happened to me too a few times, once I was actually getting leads this way, from who knows what traffic

In case it's fake traffic, you should try to block it... check the IP, once I was flooded with traffic from 1 IP so it was easy to block it in the tracker. The other time, I was receiving tons of visits from random IPs, but my coder did some htaccess magic and blocked it.

11-26-2019 02:43 AM #3 sushiparlour (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by matuloo View Post
Happened to me too a few times, once I was actually getting leads this way, from who knows what traffic

In case it's fake traffic, you should try to block it... check the IP, once I was flooded with traffic from 1 IP so it was easy to block it in the tracker. The other time, I was receiving tons of visits from random IPs, but my coder did some htaccess magic and blocked it.
Good to know it is more common than I think. Will be on the lookout forit more now. Luckily for this case it was from 1 IP so I managed to make use of the trackers filtering to block it for now. But good point on using htaccess, will give that a go if problems persist. Just hate having to spend time on non-positive revenue activities.

11-26-2019 03:18 AM #4 kjrocker (Senior Member)

Happened to me a couple of times, I blocked whole IP range traffic was coming from and it worked .. Try doing something similar ..

11-27-2019 07:14 AM #5 profit-rex (Member)

Yeah, I get this one too once in a while. It breaks my API once in a while, it sucks. I am suspecting its some bots.
Never had a full blown attack where someone was trying to mess up with my traffic stats. Blocking ip from tracker should do I guess.

11-27-2019 10:22 AM #6 twinaxe (Senior Moderator)

I had a similar situation myself some time ago and posted already about it in another thread.

In my case I once received an abuse email from my server hosting that they received a spam warning for my server.

Then I called the platform who reported the spam.

The guy told me that my link was found in one of their honeypots for guestbook spam.
So basically someone took my campaign URL and posted it with strange parameters filled in a guestbook.

That only happened once for me but was little bit annoying.

11-30-2019 08:27 AM #7 sushiparlour (Member)

Glad to know I'm not the only one having this issue. And luckily I spotted it early enough so blacklisted the IP and seems to have solved it.

But now I'm a bit paranoid it'll happen again, anyone got suggestions for prevention?

Only one I can think of is to reconcile my tracker cost vs traffic source cost. But it's a bit of a pain to do manually and isn't actually prevention but more of identifying the problem.

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