Why am I getting url requests for pages I never had on my site?

Question

On my Drupal site I'm getting strange requests for url paths that I have never had and have nothing to do with my site. Could some one explain why people (or bots) are looking for the following urls?

resource-center/news/surgery-office-pays-for-hipaa-violation
resource-center/news/state-officials-stake-out-positions-on-implementing-health-law
business-insurance/commercial-insurance/commercial-general-insurance/hotels-and-other-accommodations
resource-center/news/faq-the-obama-administration's-compromise-on-contraception-benefits
/resource-center/news/55-billion-reasons-for-consumer-driven-care

My site is for my business where we build themes for Drupal and have nothing to do with the following urls. Why am I seeing this in my Drupal reports? (our server is setup as a multi site with out clients sites. but they don't get as much traffic as our site) The client sites also have nothing to do with any of the following links and have never had url paths of that type.

Should I block the IP address that are making the requests?

looking at the data from one of the requests:

TYPE    page not found
DATE    Thursday, October 1, 2015 - 09:20
USER    Anonymous (not verified)
LOCATION    http://www.mcmahonllc.com/resource-center/news/the-white-house-fact-sheet-on-the-contraception-compromise
REFERRER    
MESSAGE resource-center/news/the-white-house-fact-sheet-on-the-contraception-compromise
SEVERITY    warning
HOSTNAME    66.249.73.183
OPERATIONS

This is all the data I have.

Is a `HTTP-Referer` [sic] header being sent with these requests? Of course, it isn't reliable, but it might give some clue as to the source. — Ben Voigt, Oct 13 '15 at 17:32
I updated my question with a print out of one of the requests — Patrick W. McMahon, Oct 13 '15 at 17:39
Should I block them? What are they trying to do to my server? — Patrick W. McMahon, Oct 13 '15 at 17:41
is it a way to spam your logs, like the referer links we now get for "seo something or other", from Russia? — Manu, Oct 13 '15 at 17:43
My guess is that it's some sort of malicious SEO, maybe there's some search engine that gives them credit for linking to your site. Unless there's some form field payload or funny URL (like use of parent paths `..`) it's probably not an attack against you. — Ben Voigt, Oct 13 '15 at 17:43
So this is harmless? They can't do anything with this request? — Patrick W. McMahon, Oct 13 '15 at 17:45

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 13 '15 at 18:29

There's nothing malicious about this. It could simply be that someone is hitting your machines because they have an out-of-date IP address for a completely different host, maybe because it was hard-coded into a hosts file by someone or a DNS somewhere down the line isn't functioning correctly.

Why am I getting url requests for pages I never had on my site?

1 Answers1