Google analtyics is showing hundreds of 404s resulting from a null url

Question

Looking at analytics for a site I maintain that is powered by Magento I am seeing that every week there are lots of visitors reaching a 404 page and it is because there is null being appended to the url. I am always on the site and have never had this happen and have no idea where these are coming from. Has anyone else encountered this or have any ideas on how I can diagnose how these are being generated?

Answer 1

Sometimes, especially on a commerce website, people change URL's manually in the address window to see if they can get into parts of the site they shouldn't, or to see if they can change prices somehow.

I'm not sure what you mean by "null appended to the URL". Try typing the malformed URL's into your own web browser, and see what happens.

Edited to add this thought:

If your site is being attacked with automated scripts, you might want to modify your 404 processing to capture the referrer. With referrer information it would be easier to sort out honest mistypings from an automated attack.

Answer 2

I'd look in my apache logs for the URL with the null characters as see what IP addresses they're coming from, and what the referrer is for each page. If I didn't have access to my apache logs I'd

1. Create a Magento Module with an event handler that fires on every page requests (one of the controller page requests)

2. In this even handler check to see if the URL has a null character on the end

3. If it does, log the contents of $_SERVER somewhere

This should give you enough information to diagnose the problem.