As an aside from most posts found here, I found a fair amount of unusual traffic recently. Last week I ended up looking up some models of Palo Alto firewalls and even downloaded a smartphone application of theirs. Nothing really out of the ordinary until this past Wednesday when I see a large influx of traffic to the site.
In the above graphic you can large influx of probing hits coming from Palo Alto Networks. I can only assuming per other farming tactics I’ve seen in the past the data flows as follows.
- You visit Vendor XYZ’s site
- Vendor XYZ parses their website logs looking for those users who are making multiple queries against the products portion of the company site
- Vendor XYZ performs a bot query hitting up the site client’s IP to see if there is a website and if contact information can be captured
- A followup script takes the results and if enough information is capture then is forwarded to the pre-sales department
- My phone rings
Really? Do you think I’ll buy a PA-5050 or PA-5060 because you cold-call me mysteriously after I visit your website?