Unknown outbound click

  • Resolved Sean

    (@sean-h)


    7 years, 8 months ago

    Greetings from a grey, rainy Belgium.

    On your WordPress dashboard you have records of referrers, how traffic got to your site, and also outbound links posted on your site that were clicked on. Now I know how bogus links can show up in referrers, you have no control on how traffic gets to your site, or where links to your site are posted. Bots or spammers might hope that you will click on a link in either of the lists out of curiosity. But how do bogus outbound links appear in the outbound link (clicks) section? One I know I didn’t post anywhere on my site.

    I’m going to manually type out the mystery link, with spaces, so no one can actually click it, like I stupidly did. It redirected me to some weird website with a flashing banner saying I need to clean my Mac. The website was in Dutch, which might have something to do with my current location being Belgium. If someone who actually knows what they are doing, feel free to remove the spaces and go there, I’d be curious to know what this link is, and if I should start worrying.

    go . oclasrv . com / afu . php ? zoneid = 471151

    Apart from the Undefined Index: coreUnown, running a (WF premium) scan completes without any problems found. My Mac also appears clean and my site is running normally.

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • wfalaa

    (@wfalaa)

    7 years, 8 months ago

    Hi sean-h,
    This website link you mentioned seems to be related to a browser-hijacking script, just follow this Google search link and you will see many articles about how to get rid of it.

    Most likely, some of your website visitors have their browsers infected with this script replacing links on your website with this spam link, so when these links are clicked at their end you may get that counted as outbound link in your status.

    However, there are two things you could do:
    – Check your website with any “Outbound links checker” tool, to make sure these links doesn’t exist any where on your website. Although I’m sure Wordfence would notify you if such a link exists in a (comment/post/page) but just to double check.

    – Make sure your Mac is clean and none of your browsers is infected with these hijacking scripts.

    Thanks.

    Thread Starter Sean

    (@sean-h)

    7 years, 8 months ago

    Hi wfalaa,

    Thank you for clearing that up. The general consensus from other research is that it was quite possibly a visitors infected computer that logged that outbound link. It is also the only dodgy link I have ever noticed in outbound. Even though I clicked on it, I was able to close my browser and clear all the cookies I didn’t recognise and then opened it back up and went about my business. A mild browser hijack this time. It must have been spamvertising of sorts as the site was in the language of my location.

    For the rest, my computer and site seems fine. I’ll be more careful next time a dodgy link shows up.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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