fraenk

Interesting technique!

Thanks for clearing this up Samuel! Good to know we need not worry about it ??

Also: HOW do they manage to create those pageviews with the title attribute “co.lumb”?

The only way i can think of how this would be possible is to actually trigger the analytics.js with “fake” tracking-information but our UA codes.

Now I also wonder if the hits ever even reached our sites or if only the analytics script has been triggered completely unrelated to our sites.

This however would imply that the co.lumb pageviews should appear on all kinds of sites, not just WP. But then google should be full of results about it, it isnt.

All sites i am maintaining are tracking with “Google Analytics by Yoast”. What are you all using? Yoast too? Maybe that’s the “attack route”?

@arnie_green same for me, all co.lumb visits have been from either Moscow or “Samara Oblast”. The first hit appeared isolated on Dec 2, since Dec 6 they are visiting once or twice on all 5 sites I checked!

@arnie_green
– the pages have no common content, i get that refferred visit about twice daily on several unrelated sites of clients. the sites are even in different languages and none is related to russia at all.
– i have been getting these hits for about a week or two now

@thijs
– because we do not need to give the spammer any additional exposure… at least we shouldnt post plain links which will be reindexed by google-bots etc.
– however the link and campaign IDs may be helpful to find out more potentially!

co.lumb pages show up on my analytics as well. really puzzled on how this happens but i suspect that my blog is being visited in an iframe through co.lumb…

i have no idea but it worries me a bit!