TallBill Member Posts: 298 From: St. Louis, MO Registered: 11-22-2002 |
For those of you who run websites (and actually pay attention to your log files  ), there are a whole bunch of sites claiming to be the MJ12 Bot (Majestic-12 is a group trying to built the world's largest distributed search engine), but who are not what they claim to be. I don't have the web address with me at work, but when I get home, I can update this to link to the site where they maintain an incomplete list of such fake IPs as well as giving you a rundown of how to uncover these fakes. For example, if it claims to be version 1.08 it is a fake.Again, I will update as soon as I am able. ------------------ “...prayer itself is an art which only the Holy Ghost can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer. Pray for prayer—pray till you can pray; pray to be helped to pray, and give not up praying because you cannot pray, for it is when you think you cannot pray that you are most praying. Sometimes when you have no sort of comfort in your supplications, it is then that your heart—all broken and cast down—is really wrestling and truly prevailing with the Most High.” |
Briant Member Posts: 742 From: Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada Registered: 01-20-2001 |
But what's the security concern? Why does it matter? ------------------ Check out this webhost! Fantastic prices, features and support! |
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TallBill Member Posts: 298 From: St. Louis, MO Registered: 11-22-2002 |
Here is the page with all the information, including a link to a blog entry on another site that tells how to use apache to block the fake bots. As to what the security concern is, if they are masquerading under someone else’s ID, surely you don’t think they are trying to do good, do you? Think of all the havoc they could be reeking. If you use your site (as I do) to provide content for download, they could be grabbing your legit stuff, infecting it deliberately, then re-offering the infected versions themselves, with one result being that your reputation takes the hit, to say nothing of all of the damage done to others by the infected files. This is just one example of the harm they could do—your only defense being to keep them out in the first place. I call that a major security concern. ------------------ “...prayer itself is an art which only the Holy Ghost can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer. Pray for prayer—pray till you can pray; pray to be helped to pray, and give not up praying because you cannot pray, for it is when you think you cannot pray that you are most praying. Sometimes when you have no sort of comfort in your supplications, it is then that your heart—all broken and cast down—is really wrestling and truly prevailing with the Most High.” |
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TallBill Member Posts: 298 From: St. Louis, MO Registered: 11-22-2002 |
QUICK UPDATE: The linked-in solution provided through Majestic-12 does not seem to work on my server, but causes an internal server error. I tried it in my htaccess file. As soon as I tried to view my page with their solution in place, I could not access my web site. As soon as I commented the solution out, my web site returned. ------------------ “...prayer itself is an art which only the Holy Ghost can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer. Pray for prayer—pray till you can pray; pray to be helped to pray, and give not up praying because you cannot pray, for it is when you think you cannot pray that you are most praying. Sometimes when you have no sort of comfort in your supplications, it is then that your heart—all broken and cast down—is really wrestling and truly prevailing with the Most High.” |
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Briant Member Posts: 742 From: Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada Registered: 01-20-2001 |
quote: Sorry, but I really don't get it. I have several websites with lots of downloadable content. Sure, people can download and infect/alter/whatever all they want, but they can't make their altered versions available from *my* websites - they'd have to put them on their own websites somewhere. And this can happen bot or no bot. The only way to prevent this from happening is to not have any content or even a website in the first place. Don't worry about it. You'll sleep better. ------------------ Check out this webhost! Fantastic prices, features and support! |
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TallBill Member Posts: 298 From: St. Louis, MO Registered: 11-22-2002 |
As Christians we are to be good stewards of what He has granted us. How is your advice in this a mark of good stewardship? I will prevent what I can prevent, and of all the people here—some of whom run websites, and perhaps even own providers—some of them know how to prevent it. ------------------ “...prayer itself is an art which only the Holy Ghost can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer. Pray for prayer—pray till you can pray; pray to be helped to pray, and give not up praying because you cannot pray, for it is when you think you cannot pray that you are most praying. Sometimes when you have no sort of comfort in your supplications, it is then that your heart—all broken and cast down—is really wrestling and truly prevailing with the Most High.” |
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Briant Member Posts: 742 From: Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada Registered: 01-20-2001 |
quote: Easy - time is one of the things we're to be good stewards of.
quote: But again, why does it matter? What are you really accomplishing? ------------------ Check out this webhost! Fantastic prices, features and support! |
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TallBill Member Posts: 298 From: St. Louis, MO Registered: 11-22-2002 |
Do you want Christians to be known as spammers? Because if you do nothing to stop such a thing, that is what their victims will think: they will think they are being spammed by Christians. And what does that do to the reputation of Christ? Some things you need to spend time on. ------------------ “...prayer itself is an art which only the Holy Ghost can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer. Pray for prayer—pray till you can pray; pray to be helped to pray, and give not up praying because you cannot pray, for it is when you think you cannot pray that you are most praying. Sometimes when you have no sort of comfort in your supplications, it is then that your heart—all broken and cast down—is really wrestling and truly prevailing with the Most High.” |
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Briant Member Posts: 742 From: Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada Registered: 01-20-2001 |
Ah, I think I get it - preventing bots means reducing the chances of your email address being scraped of your pages for the spammers to use. Yes, that's a good reason, thanks.  ------------------ Check out this webhost! Fantastic prices, features and support! |
buddboy Member Posts: 2220 From: New Albany, Indiana, U.S. Registered: 10-08-2004 |
I don't think that's what he means. I think he's still on the whole software thing. BrianT I agree, how is someone going to masquerade your program as theirs when it won't be on your website, and they don't need to pretend to be Majestic-12 to do so. If someone is stealing your stuff, you could just put a note in that says if you didn't download it at your website, then it isn't real so don't use it. And apparently the fix can cause problems. ------------------ |
CPUFreak91 Member Posts: 2337 From: Registered: 02-01-2005 |
It doesn't sound like a threat to me. MJ12 Bot sounds just as "bad" as Google Bot. They're spiders. They crawl the web and find everything they can get their hands on to index it and store it in a database. If spammers are pretending to be MJ12 bot, block their IPs. It's no big deal ------------------ "Oh, bother," said the Borg. "We've assimilated Pooh." Any fool can know, the point is to understand. -- Albert Einstein |
jestermax Member Posts: 1064 From: Ontario, Canada Registered: 06-21-2006 |
With Google's bot though you can use the robot file to thwart it off. I'll admit i don't know much about spiders, but I'm guessing other bots aren't so accommodating. ------------------ |
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TallBill Member Posts: 298 From: St. Louis, MO Registered: 11-22-2002 |
Any legitimate bot will obey the robots.txt file. That includes the real MJ12 Bot. On the other hand, anyone who is trying to hide behind a false ID is doing so for a reason, and that reason ain't good (if you recall John 3, those who are doing good come into the light so that it can be seen that what they do is of God; but those who do evil will not come into the light for fear that their evil deeds will be revealed). So, those doing good do not hide. This means that those who hide are not doing good. ------------------ “...prayer itself is an art which only the Holy Ghost can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer. Pray for prayer—pray till you can pray; pray to be helped to pray, and give not up praying because you cannot pray, for it is when you think you cannot pray that you are most praying. Sometimes when you have no sort of comfort in your supplications, it is then that your heart—all broken and cast down—is really wrestling and truly prevailing with the Most High.” |
spade89 Member Posts: 561 From: houston,tx Registered: 11-28-2006 |
hey bill aren't you taking it a bit too far??i mean maybe what the so called "spammers" did was wrong but i don't see how it is a security alert?? are they the only ones that do this?? it's not like they are trying to hack your server or penetrate any form of security you have put place. ------------------ Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. |
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jestermax Member Posts: 1064 From: Ontario, Canada Registered: 06-21-2006 |
quote: Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but that's somewhat of a strong statement that I think is being mistakenly supported by scripture... ------------------ |
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TallBill Member Posts: 298 From: St. Louis, MO Registered: 11-22-2002 |
Don't take it beyond the context of the events that are the subject of this thread, and think about it some more. ------------------ “...prayer itself is an art which only the Holy Ghost can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer. Pray for prayer—pray till you can pray; pray to be helped to pray, and give not up praying because you cannot pray, for it is when you think you cannot pray that you are most praying. Sometimes when you have no sort of comfort in your supplications, it is then that your heart—all broken and cast down—is really wrestling and truly prevailing with the Most High.” |
