An extreme approach to referral spam

Today I went to have a look at a site which came up in a google search I’d done, and I was greeted with this message:
————————————————————–
Your IP: xxx.xx.xxx.xx

You have been denied access to this site. This is because the ISP you are with has people that have been referral spamming this site.
————————————————————–
My ‘ISP’ in this case is my employer, who provides bandwidth and manages IP address allocations for a wide range of businesses, including actual ISPs. So it seems like the owner of this site has decided to deny access to his site to a massive number of people (basically the entire range of addresses that we manage), because he received referral spam which may or may not have come from a customer of one of our customers.

Now I know that no one likes spam, and that it can provoke some extreme reactions, but this initially struck me as a bit ill-conceived. Then I realised that it was referral spam! I know that everyone likes looking at their stats, but blocking out a big chunk of Australian traffic because someone has put a couple of bogus lines in your web server logs?
——–

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader.