Website Hits from Brazil

[Taylored]

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Hi All,

I wonder if one or more of you smart people could help me please. I have a basic html website hosted by Ventraip. Google analytics show that historically it gets maybe one or two hits a day. its a bookkeepers / Accountants website with 4 pages, no functions and acts mainly as a information page for my business. Its been up for ages.

Any way, in recent months that one or two hits has become three to five and ateast half of the hits come from Brazil?? I am a regional accountant in SA. Most hits come from Adelaide / Sydney and Melbourne which seems logical but now from Brazil and strangely only there, not Europe or anywhere and lots of them. Some randoms from the US and the like but its got me wondering.

Could I have been hacked and my site is being used for something like bouncing of spam or something worse? How would I know and how can I find out. It seems a little strange and I thought I would ask here. I have been on this site for a few years now under another name so apologies if the new name doesn’t have any posts.

Thanks

Marc

[Lucinda Lions]

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Hi Taylored

Welcome to the forum, even though you’ve been here before under a different name.

That’s very curious, and hopefully some of our smart forumites can assist with your question.

In the meantime, you may want to add a few details to your signature so we know who you are. To do that, visit the Control panel (the link is in the grey bar above the forum) and choose Edit signature.

Lucinda

[mypresences]

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Hi Marc … are the hits coming from semalt.com in google analytics?

If so they are just an annoying botnet that crawls the net indexing information .. it is not malicious.

You can find out more here and apparently can enter your details to stop them crawling your site:
http://semalt.com/project_crawler.php

Hope that helps.

[Gizmo]

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Hello,

Unlikely to be suspicious.
If you where hacked I think you would be seeing a lot more traffic than 1-2 a day.

Best bet to be sure though is to ask your hosting company.

[Taylored]

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Hi Gizmo and mypresences,

Thanks very much for your reply guys. mypresences that is most helpful and I will research it more thoroughly now I know what I should be looking for. Glad its not too suspicious. I did have dreams of intercepting an international money laundering scheme :rolleyes: but bots sounds a much more likely scenario

Thanks again

Marc

[Mike Ouwerkerk]

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Keep an eye on it. I had a few hits from Brazil, then got 45,000 over a few days as hackers tried to brute force attack my (nonexistant) admin account password. My site runs on Joomla, and I have a security component on there, so a few tweaks sorted that out.

Make sure you have backups too in case things go nasty!

[Taylored]

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Thanks Mike

[Anonymous]

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mypresences, post: 204902 wrote:

Hi Marc … are the hits coming from semalt.com in google analytics?

If so they are just an annoying botnet that crawls the net indexing information .. it is not malicious.

You can find out more here and apparently can enter your details to stop them crawling your site:
http://semalt.com/project_crawler.php

Hope that helps.

semalt is actually a problem, and I have blocked traffic from semalt to websites I manage. From what I can see, a lot of the semalt traffic appears to originate from Brazil. It is hard to explain simply and without jargon, but semalt hijacks/redirects your website ID to make other websites appear to have more traffic than they really have. In most cases there is no damage done to the site being hijacked, however they can steal your bandwidth, and sometimes your credibility. What appears as hits from robots on the traffic listing, ends up being redirected to sites they want to inflate the traffic numbers on.

In some cases, hijacked sites have been blacklisted because they end up being associated with the semalt activity on the site. I haven’t heard of too many cases of this, but a blacklisted site can be very difficult to sort out. One of my customers had major blacklisting issues with emails for about a month for similar issues. They could email out, but anyone on an Optus email address couldn’t mail in. Don’t ask, because if you do I will tell you and you had better be prepared for a long rant!

Anyway, if it is semalt, it would be a good precaution to block them. I guess from the nature of your business, that international visitors to your site won’t contribute to the bottom line anyway.

Darryl

[adrian]

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I’m seeing a few funky things in Google Analytics lately. There’s a few places using random GA ID’s to generate fake hits in analytics. The goal being for webmasters to have a look at the referring site, which will be a site that stuffs cookies for affiliate sales.

The link from mypresences works to remove yourself from semalt: http://semalt.com/project_crawler.php

You can tell google analytics to “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders”, info here : http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/30/google-analytics-can-now-exclude-traffic-from-known-bots-and-spiders/

If you still have issues, you can manually setup filters to block traffic, or exclude it from your analytics, but only worry about that if the above doesn’t do the job.

Hope this helps.

[MikeDav]

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adrian, post: 207041 wrote:

I’m seeing a few funky things in Google Analytics lately. There’s a few places using random GA ID’s to generate fake hits in analytics. The goal being for webmasters to have a look at the referring site, which will be a site that stuffs cookies for affiliate sales.

The link from mypresences works to remove yourself from semalt: http://semalt.com/project_crawler.php

You can tell google analytics to “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders”, info here : http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/30/google-analytics-can-now-exclude-traffic-from-known-bots-and-spiders/

If you still have issues, you can manually setup filters to block traffic, or exclude it from your analytics, but only worry about that if the above doesn’t do the job.

Hope this helps.
From my experience, all of my hits from Brazil are from Semalt and it is a real pain to exclude them from GA. They keep on coming back with different Semalt url’s and keep on registering non-relevant traffic.

[Anonymous]

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MikeDav, post: 208084 wrote:

From my experience, all of my hits from Brazil are from Semalt and it is a real pain to exclude them from GA. They keep on coming back with different Semalt url’s and keep on registering non-relevant traffic.

Mike,

it’s more important to block them from the site than exclude them from GA. GA is only reporting, and excluding them from the report is not stopping the Semalt activity. If they are excluded from the site, then in turn they are excluded from the GA report as well as stopping the damage they are causing. Having said that, it is hard to block a moving target as you said.

Darryl

[Taylored]

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Hi Mike and Darryl,

Thank you very much for your advice. I have explored these ideas and think that your assumption are pretty well correct. Thanks again

Cheers

Marc Taylor

[Author]

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