Is my website being Attacked?

12 replies
Hey everyone, I'm not new to Warrior forum but it's a new account (just starting a new life, lol).

I don't want to sound over-dramatic (and I don't feel so yet) but I want to forestall the (possibly evil) events.
Interestingly, same pattern in visitors behavior appeared on two of my related websites (related topic), so that probably cannot be a coincidence.
Here's the case: I noticed a quick change in my site's visitor stats. Change appeared 3 days ago and continues.

Info from google analytics:
  • Increased visits (but not visitors);
  • Increased bounce rate by 20%;
  • decreased avg. time on site by 50%;
  • pages/visit dropped.
Thankfully it didn't hurt sales yet.
- I didn't do any changes on my websites.
Google webmasters doesn't show these backlinks, but I found in hostgator cpanel some strange looking domains (subdomains actually) from russia .ru that are linking to my sites (backlinks are not actually there). Most of them look like ***.mybb.ru, ***.rolebb.ru, ***.2bb.ru. I don't know if they're somehow related because I don't know since when they're there.
Possible explanations in my opinion:
  • someone wants to hurt my visitor stats and possibly hurt SE rankings;
  • someone is getting ready or already attacking my website somehow (I've got antiflood system installed);
I never encountered such behavior.
What do you think? What kind of sign is this?
What can you suggest?
#attacked #website
  • Profile picture of the author rosetrees
    Russia is one of the countries that I considering banning entirely from accessing my sites. I haven't done it yet. There's another one on my "list" too!
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    • Profile picture of the author sbucciarel
      Banned
      Originally Posted by rosetrees View Post

      Russia is one of the countries that I considering banning entirely from accessing my sites. I haven't done it yet. There's another one on my "list" too!
      How do you do that? Ban a country or country extension?
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      • Profile picture of the author Underground SEO
        Originally Posted by sbucciarel View Post

        How do you do that? Ban a country or country extension?
        You can ban a specific country ip range
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        • Profile picture of the author BruceMind
          Another interesting thing I just noticed is that this started happening at the day that I launched an adwords campaign (but campaign targets another website on different server, though on the same analytics account). Can this be somehow related?
          Also CPanel doesn't show outstanding visitors change as analytics do.
          That's frustrating...
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          • Profile picture of the author goozleology
            What type of site are you running? Wordpress blog? Joomla? If so, try installing a security plugin and always make sure that you are running the most up to date version of the software because security is the most important thing.
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      • Profile picture of the author rosetrees
        Originally Posted by sbucciarel View Post

        How do you do that? Ban a country or country extension?
        As Underground SEO said, I was hoping I could do it by banning ranges of ip addresses. I started looking into that a couple of weeks ago. I haven't done it yet as I'm concerned not to get too ban happy and accidentally ban other countries too.

        Are there are Russian members here? I wonder if they know why so many spammers seem to be coming from that area? In my case it's usually spam user sign-ups on Wordpress sites that allow that allow that.

        Maybe that's what's happening to the OP. Being surfed by bots that are trying to find WP sites to join?
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  • Profile picture of the author Davioli
    I may be wrong here... but I think the referrer stats you see in Cpanel are your typical awstats referrer spam and is something you shouldn't be worried about.

    The analytics data may just be a one off.

    Thats my theory. Occam's Razor!
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  • Profile picture of the author alexmobile
    Ref spam indeed. Nothing to worry about
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    QRID.com - login to websites by scanning QR code on your monitor! No Passwords!
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  • Profile picture of the author sheikdr
    thats bad,,,our website is getting attacked.......all blog should be installed with security plugins......how to instal that... where to find it?
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  • Profile picture of the author susanexpress
    I suffered the same experience. and I am sorry to tell you that your web is indeed attacked.
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    • Profile picture of the author BruceMind
      Yes, I was thinking about referrer spam too, found some information about it on the net. Thank you guys.

      However, if anyone else got different ideas please share. Thank you in advance
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  • Profile picture of the author marc7
    Sorry to hear this news bruce...
    Your post just made me put security on my site

    Hope all gets better!

    Marc7
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    Marc Bell Marketing.com | Branding. Selling. Networking
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