mumble, darn it, my maps

[JimMarn]

This is mostly just to let you know.

Anyway, I was looking at my site visitor logs and saw things about 'Product' and 'SaleDetail' and went "Whaaat !?".

A site, that when I went there, claimed to be a simple web crawler.

Here is one of the page hits from another of my web sites:
19 Nov 2016 02:49:41 AM blexhn25.​webmeup.​com dwarfhome/​articles/​295/​FrontProductSaleDetail-​3207.​aspx

My stuff is free. And that is not like any web crawler link attempt I have seen since 1999.

So I stopped by to let folks know why my maps have suddenly vanished. I am currently working on watermarking over 2500 maps, d&d and Traveller.

As I get them done, I'll put them back on my web site.

I know about odd or not there page urls from various attempts to find something anything on a site.

But I've had 107 of these on just one of my sub-domains since last Friday. There are even more attempts on my other sites.

 

[inexorabletash]

Unusual requests like that which appear in your server logs are often bots scanning for known vulnerabilities. There may have been a security hole in a widely deployed web utility called "FrontProductSaleDetail-​3207.​aspx". I see that sort of crud all the time on my various sites.

 

[JimMarn]

Thats possible. But I have been informed by some professional mappers, who work on commissions, that their work has been sold without their knowledge by a different site than the one I've mentioned.

So, I'm mainly taking precautions.

My drive-in movie theater site some years ago got many of the maps I put together, showing where drive-ins were located, were added to a nudity site... with my username on it from my drive-ins site. I was upset by that. It certainly violated my terms of service. I let my web host know, and they said I didn't have to worry about my site being taken down as they clearly took my work and used it for non-authorized sites over seas.

 

[JimMarn]

I've decided it was a false alarm and I have returned my maps to the site.

 

[JimMarn]

Well... they are in India. And they apparently are upsetting lots of people across the internet. They, and another site I has linked to me, pretend they are helping people build web sites. I build my own and have only received help from the people who created the cms i use and the other folks at the web host.

I'll continue to leave my maps up, but I'll start putting a watermark of some kind on them. I have received help from the mapping forum I'm on with this bit.