I run a number of websites / web services on NGINX with Ubuntu.
Today I noticed the following line in my rogue.access.log (I have a separate vhost/log file to catch all requests for websites other than ones I'm expecting):
Server: "gmail.com" - Virtual Host: "_" - Remote Address: "195.62.53.168" - Request: "GET /engine/log.txt HTTP/1.1" - Status: "501" - Referer: "-" - User Agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:30.N) Gecko/20110302 Firefox/30.0".
I regularly receive strange requests including \x01
(scanning bots) and people setting their domain's A records to my IP, these I know are normal, though probably with malicious purposes; they just reach my catch-all vhost (a current example would be top10datingsitesuk.co.uk
. However, I'm confused as to how a person can request gmail.com from my server? Obviously Google didn't accidentally change their A records to my IP, so how is this done, and how might I better stop it? The URL above points to my server and demonstrates how I deal with this situation, but am I handling it correctly?