"bot" Views From "moscov-russian Federation"

I've been seeing those too. Lots of hits from 'Moscov'

bots bots bots bots
bots bots bots bots
bots bots bots bots
bots bots bots bots

On my personal site, I get lots of bots from Russia and Ukraine. To them I say "nyet" and block them. They mostly try to hack my site and scrape my content. Fortunately, I haven't gotten too many on FAA lately. When one of my images on FAA is getting lots of hits from them, I just put the image in a PW protected gallery for a couple of days.

Dave Gordon
http://dgportfolio.net

David that is exactly what I am wondering? Is this something to be concerned about and is it possible for them to steal the content from FAA? Also if there were already multiple hits like the 6 within 1 minute does that mean it's already been taken?

& David what do you mean by a PW protected gallery?

Me too ! Lots of hits ! Thought it was strange and funny that shortly after the first visit, I received am email regarding Russian women for sale as mail order brides! Also, other opportunities if I wasn't interested in a bride..... Didn't read or respond to the email - just deleted after reading what I could without opening the entire email! Anyone else get an email regarding Russian women?

Putin found a love for art:)

Oh my! Definitely no emails regarding acquiring a "Bride" but definitely concerned about the "scraping of content" that David describes!

David what is PW is this something I should look into

Hi Julie,

Its possible for anyone to steal the content on FAA or anywhere else that's on the internet. You have to mouse over the location, get the IP address and research it to determine if that particular instance was a bot or not. It could also be an innocent viewer. My experience with Russia and Ukraine is that they have been mostly bots. There's a bot in Russia called Yandex which is a big search engine - sort of like a Russian version of Google.

Sometimes you can see postings online about particularly bad bots and IP addresses. But nothing much you can do to prevent it here as FAA is an international site with members in those and other countries and FAA seems to welcome all traffic from anywhere in order to keep growing its presence and ranking on the internet.

I've also had multiple hits in the past from the same location that ended up being a school or university. I'm guessing that was maybe some sort of art, design or photo class where multiple students were on the same website. Because I have my own site, I don't promote FAA directly. I promote my personal site instead where I have more control over my visitors. I use the FAA shopping cart widget on my personal site as well as link my image pages to those on my AW site. Its a lot of work for sure.

Dave Gordon
http://dgportfolio.net

Just check my views and I have also views from Moscow (correctly spelled), but the most interesting part- it stopped only at images I made in abounded Soviet army bases in Latvia, or at the images with description or keywords Soviet/ socialism or communism

I've only got two visits from Moscov in the past three days, one on my sole cat image and another on a Great Smoky Mountains Railroad image. The bot's tastes seem to vary!

I guess I was the lucky one with the mail order bride from the Russian Federation. But the Moscov / Moscow views have slowed down.

Mine actually started with the Cat image and then moved on to the rest of my entire gallery of which I don't have a big collection yet, but still....every single one? A total of 36 hits in span of 2 days from 1 particular Bot! Still wondering if I should be truly concerned? If anything was done there is probably nothing I can do about it at this point but it raises the big question for me! IS MY CONTENT SAFE ON FAA OR NOT?

"& David what do you mean by a PW protected gallery?"

When you create a new gallery on FAA, you have the option of making it password protected. Only those with a password can access the password protected gallery.

Dave Gordon
http://dgportfolio.net

TY Dave, I might do that but if they have already been "viewed" and scraped the content then isn't a little late? Now my biggest concern is how safe is our art here on FAA?

"IS MY CONTENT SAFE ON FAA OR NOT?"

Your content is not safe anywhere on the internet - including FAA. The images displayed on your FAA pages are limited to 900 pixels size and they can be taken. Your high resolution images that you uploaded to FAA (used for printing) cannot be stolen.

Dave Gordon
http://dgportfolio.net

I looked up the IP address of the "Moscov" bot that has started visiting my images. One image was "visited" about 5 times within 2 minutes. Anyway, I looked it up, and here is some info on the place:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/66674/Birobidzhan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birobidzhan


Last but not least, from http://www.bing.com/search?q=Birobidzhan&pc=MOZI&form=MOZLBR

"Birobidzhan high crime rate:
Unfortunately the city is known in Russia as the place with the highest rate of drug-related crimes. And this is a complex problem. Birobidzhan, being not a large city, is a key point of transportation of drugs from the Far East of Russia and China to western region of Russia and Eastern Europe (the only highway and railway are passing through the city).

Also the climate of the region is favorable to growing narcotic plants.

The region has the highest unemployment level on the Far East (about 10% in 2012).

That’s why a lot of people (local and foreigners) are tempted to earn “easy” money by growing, producing, transporting drugs, they also use drugs, hence the crime rate is high..".

Sometimes the scraper sites advertise the stolen images as "free wallpaper" to lure visitors. and when people go to the free wallpaper site, they get a virus on their computers or they get hacked.

One of my images was hit recently by the Moscov visitor 5 times. The IP address is 87.225.108.234 This IP appears to be a spammer bot in Russia. I think spammer bots attempt to harvest email addresses and put spam onto websites. (perhaps for mail order brides).

http://www.stopforumspam.com/ipcheck/87.225.108.234

https://cleantalk.org/blacklists/87.225.108.234

Dave Gordon
http://dgportfolio.net

David G.,

Looks like we both were looking at that IP address (yep, same one you got). I posted right before you did. ;)

Well short of crawling in a hole and hiding I guess it's something we have to live with if we are going to put our art out there for sale! I will never understand the deceitful and criminal mind and hope that I never fall so far that I begin to!

Why oh why are people so concerned with image theft. Do you really think it's taking bread out of you mouth?

For me David Lane it's not a matter of taking bread out of my mouth..it's a matter of putting a lot of hours into creating something your proud of and than having someone come along and take that from you. If you had a burglar come into your home and take something I would be willing to bet you would not be okay with that and would feel quite violated.

...1, 2, 3,....wait for it, wait for it...



...waiting for the usual copyright / infringement thread folks to show up here. ;)

Why oh why are people so concerned about people who are concerned with their images being stolen?

Ok thanks everyone.

Keep it civil

FAA seems miraculously able to hide the bots.

Please hide both Moscow/v bots.....their visits contaminate my pages, and, the visitor stats, rendering them useless. Or, turn off the stat counter!

Thank you.

Thank you for taking the time in answering my questions. I have come to the following conclusions.

Bots are meaningless so don't think twice about them..unless they offer you a Russian Bride which is good if you happen to be in the market for one!

I should not be concerned because what's going to happen is going to happen and there is nothing I can do about it.

...and that some people seem to think your stupid to inquire or be concerned.

Have a wonderful Holiday everyone :)

I agree with your conclusions, Julie!

If you're worried about the security of your FAA account and AW you should consider your password. Probably the best thing to do is to check that it's long enough, because not having the ability to use special characters means an easy hack if it's too short.

For example even if it's unusual but all letters it's a breeze. 'cathead' would take about 2 seconds to hack.

Adding numbers 'cathead1' would take it up to 11 minutes which is a huge increase in security, but still relatively useless. Capitalizing the 'C' gets 15 hours.

'cathead11111111' would crank it up to one million years. 'Cathead12345678 is 6 billion. Add 90 and you're looking at 23 trillion years.

This is just a simple example, and we'd all like an easy to remember and type but IMPOSSIBLE to crack code, but check the source here:

https://howsecureismypassword.net/

Thanks Mark! Tried my one. It's not the best but enough for my lifetime. So I keep it.