Google Analytics Referral Traffic Source Spoofing Attack
@Moderator
Updated November 29, 2016 ● 568 views
A place to discover the latest security threats making the headlines online.
Google Analytics
There has been some weird activity on Dizkover's Google Analytics reports. Today, we've noticed a spike of traffic referral coming from Lifehacker.com. So I checked what article from Lifehacker that is referring Dizkover and I was greeted by a fake site pretending to be Lifehacker.
This has been the tactic lately by spammers in order to get traffic from webmasters. They constantly bombard your site with traffic coming from a domain name that acts as an adverising. So webmasters who checks their analytics reports often end up checking out the site.
This new type attack however is clever. It pretends to be coming from a major website. This is a new type of attack I've never seen before.
The original domain that points to the referral is xn--lifehacer-1rb.com. For some reason, the browser and google analytics does not show the "xn--" and "-1rb". So some people would think it is coming from Lifehacker.com until you click the content of the page and realize it's a fake site.
Dizkover
Google Analytics Referral Traffic Source Spoofing Attack
Updated November 29, 2016 ● 568 views
A place to discover the latest security threats making the headlines online.
There has been some weird activity on Dizkover's Google Analytics reports. Today, we've noticed a spike of traffic referral coming from Lifehacker.com. So I checked what article from Lifehacker that is referring Dizkover and I was greeted by a fake site pretending to be Lifehacker.
This has been the tactic lately by spammers in order to get traffic from webmasters. They constantly bombard your site with traffic coming from a domain name that acts as an adverising. So webmasters who checks their analytics reports often end up checking out the site.
This new type attack however is clever. It pretends to be coming from a major website. This is a new type of attack I've never seen before.
The original domain that points to the referral is xn--lifehacer-1rb.com. For some reason, the browser and google analytics does not show the "xn--" and "-1rb". So some people would think it is coming from Lifehacker.com until you click the content of the page and realize it's a fake site.
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