[X] My Assistant

[dmuller]

As you may know I operate a realtime simulation website, and thus have come to face some of the annoyances with it. They have included search bots that access all pages at the same time which is a real headache for my loading intensive realtime simulations (these a rogue bots ... Yahoo and Google spread their requests over time), down to outright data fishing requests (query strings like ../../../password). Unfortunately that has led to me having to block quite a range of IP addresses and even some countries from where no legitimate request came from. BUT ...

There is one frequently occurring mystery which I just dont seem to understand; maybe others who manage websites have seen the same and know what it is. I log which pages are accessed, and monitor some of the variables in the query string (the stuff after the '?' in the url). Whilst allowed values include missions like voyager2 and cassini, there are many requests looking for a mission called

?mission=http://owned-nets.blogspot.com/2009/04/crim-net.html?please_click_on_my_google_ads
[I dont suggest you visit that site]

Is this some weird form of phishing or anything like that? I just dont understand what the purpose of this could be. Because it's in the query string it won't be posted anywhere anyway. Has anybody else seen this before? Would be keen to know what it all means.

[dmuller]

My thanks and gratitude to a member of this forum for putting in a lot of effort into this issue. It turned out that my ISP-hosted website had indeed been hacked, and that it was possible that some visitors may have been led to a fake anti-virus page. My apologies for that. The issue seems to have been resolved now and full functionality of the affected webpage will be reinstated in due course, along with even more system monitoring than before. What a pain, takes the fun out of telling spaceflight stories!