Huge traffic spike from weird referral

[Trikkur]

I have a site that normally gets about 40-50 visitors a day, but a few weeks back I started getting like 500 visitors a day, this slowly died down that week and is now back to normal. It was all from the referrer traffic-network(dot)net. I have no clue why I would get thousands of visitors from them and I don't think any of those visitors did anything.

Thoughts on what this could be?

[Gydian]

Is the domain a typo domain? Sounds like someone bought traffic for a site and it ended up at yours.

[Michael Martinez]

Google reports that traffic-network.net was an intermediary site in a series of malware attacks on other sites. See the details here.

It would be prudent for you to check your server carefully to determine whether its security was breached.

I would strongly advise you to change passwords and reboot the server, although if it was infected with a boot-capable application that might cause more harm than help.

Treat this traffic surge with great suspicion, but don't blame traffic-network.net -- they may not have been anything more than an unsuspecting bridge.

[Trikkur]

Honestly I figured it was something like that, but I've got no clue how to go about fixing this. That site is just on one of my GoDaddy shared hosting. Maybe I'll just contact their support about it.

[Michael Martinez]

I am only suggesting you take prudent measures to ensure the integrity of your site has not been compromised. The information I uncovered in no way indicates that anything bad actually happened to your server or account.

I have seen these kinds of attacks hammer my own server with several thousand failed attempts to break in per day. The chances of a breach are usually pretty low, but I feel you should make sure it didn't happen.