Earlier today, my weblog was attacked by some sort of evil referer spamming porn robot! It loaded my front page, many times per second, with the Referer: header set to the URLs of all sorts of porn sites. It caused my referer list to show all these porn sites, instead of the sites that actually link to me. And it was a denial of service attack, to boot.

A little research showed that the hits were coming from some server at xcite.net, a porn hosting company. So “Deny from 216.169.111.0/24” did the trick quite handily. The robot finally gave up after eating 403 errors for a while. I purged my referer table of the dirty, and now I’m back in business.

I suspect this was an automated attack. Some idiot must have downloaded a list of all active weblogs from someplace and set his script going. The motive was to get the URLs of his sites to appear in the referer lists of regular sites, hoping that some make their referers public, like I do. This may drive traffic, and possibly the coveted PageRank, to his sites. But not through me.