Apparently a lot of people are.
I didn't know what it was, but I've been getting referrer spammed like mad for Symmetrel today. Amusingly, referrer spam has no effect on my site, but that doesn't seem to stop the lame SEO slime who do it.
Anyway, I saw the name a few dozen times and it just sounded like it hand to be a drug. A quick web search revealed that it is the brand name for Amantadine.
Amantadine is an antiviral medication. It blocks the actions of viruses in your body. Amantadine is used to treat and to prevent influenza A (a viral infection).
[Source: Yahoo! Health]
Ahh, so it's a seasonal thing, not a new drug. That explains why I'm seeing the sudden increase in spam for it.
It's funny how all drug names seem to have similar names. You can hear (or read) a new one, have no idea what it is, but still know it's a drug of some kind.
Watching server logs in real-time is fun, no? The spam sure sticks out when you do... :-)
Posted by jzawodn at November 29, 2005 06:23 AM
It's a cure for bird flu, no doubt.
Hijacking someone's spam campaign using legitimate blog posts is fun, no? :)
I use:
tail -f access_log | ~/t4.pl
The source code for t4.pl isn't terribly complex either. I should post that...
So, any good ideas for stopping referral log spam? It doesn't put any links on my public site either, but I hate skewing my stats with bogus requests. I've tried mod_security, but didn't have the time to put into tuning a ruleset that wouldn't block legit content.
That turned out to be more overhead than it's worth.
Symmetrel sounds too much like a mispelling of "symmetrical".
I've been using .htaccess rules to hand referrer spammers a nice 403. It's fun. :)
I too was getting sick of spam, and modified a PERL script out there to be a little more encompassing.
http://developer.spikesource.com/wiki/index.php/Stopping_bots_in_apache_at_the_network_layer
I was also led to log-watching thanks to spam (I'm on a virtual host with 128MB memory, so keeping the waste down is a bit important). What I'd really like to have is a ApacheLog2Atom script, to enable a desktop ticker RSS reader showing me near-real-time events.
(I know I could use a ssh console, and/or it would be a lot more efficient streamed, but it's only for occasional use and this approach could be sweeter with not that much coding).
I was also led to log-watching thanks to spam (I'm on a virtual host with 128MB memory, so keeping the waste down is a bit important). What I'd really like to have is a ApacheLog2Atom script, to enable a desktop ticker RSS reader showing me near-real-time events.
(I know I could use a ssh console, and/or it would be a lot more efficient streamed, but it's only for occasional use and this approach could be sweeter with not that much coding).
t4.pl sounds interesting., I would like to have a look at it.
