3 Steps To Get Rid Of Spam Referral Traffic From Russia

“Cyber criminals are planting chips in electric irons and kettles to launch spam attacks, reports in Russia suggest,” the BBC reported a couple of years ago.

“Hidden devices are mostly being used to spread viruses, by connecting to any computer within a 200m radius which were using unprotected Wi-Fi networks,” it noted.

(Incidentally, the goods were produced in China, of course!)

Well, daily activity in Russia is relevant to our daily activity at Hedging Beta: we have been under attack in recent days from Russia, so we decided to share some views on spam referral websites that could easily harm the performance of your website.

The goal here is to preserve the performance of your server, too.

Three Simple Steps:

1. First off, you should always analyse the performance of referral traffic. A sudden increase in traffic is likely led by external activity such as that of several malicious sites (darodar.com and ilovevitaly.co, for instance), whose full details — register name, IP and so forth — can be found at Whois.net.
2. Once you have detected any spam activity, you should use appropriate rules in the .htaccess file, which is located in the root directory of your domain.
3. Finally, you should apply filters to your Analytics Tool in order to ensure that the data you are monitoring is clean. Consider that you can exclude traffic from a) a certain domain; b) internet protocol addresses (IPs); c) or even from an entire country.