Spike in site hits

[JSWski]

On Saturday morning, between midnight & 2am, my site was hit a tremendous number of times, nearly 10x what we normally get in a full day. Looking at my stats list for the day, I see that the top referrer is a rather suspicious sounding URL and, sure enough, when I clicked on the link a porn site came up and my spyware program sent me an alert. Any ideas on what happened and/or what implications this might have for me? I am already receiving spam via the forms on my site, is there some other trick up the "bad guys'" sleeves that I may soon be experiencing?

Thanks for your insights.

[Arthur]

It would seem you're the victim of (a form of) refer(r)er spam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referer_spam). Because your stats pages are publicly accessible and thus can be indexed by search engine spiders, you're an attractive target for spammers that want to get their links into the search engines. I would strongly recommend password protecting your stats pages.

The referrer spam wasn't responsible for the large number of hits by the way, that was some kind of bot/spider that was looping on some broken links.

-Arthur

[JSWski]

Thank you! This explains a lot of things, and my stats are now secured.

JW