: Unreliable referrer filed? I have been looking at our Apache log file to find the sources of referrals to our website from online publications but there are a lot of hits that I can't explain.

I have been looking at our Apache log file to find the sources of referrals to our website from online publications but there are a lot of hits that I can't explain. For instance, how did this happen:

130.185.153.42 - - [22/Feb/2017:02:52:37 -0500]
"GET /drg/ahrq/drg2mdcxw1989.sas7bdat
HTTP/1.1" 404 26074
"http://washpost.bloomberg.com/market-news/"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WO W64)
AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102
Safari/537.36" "-"

According to that log entry, there was a referral from a popular column on Bloomberg to a very obscure binary file that no longer exists on our site. There is no possibility Bloomberg ever referred to it. There are so many thousands of these dubious references (many to real files) that I wonder if the referrer field is even worth looking at. These are all from prestige publications that are unlikely to be referral spammers. Is referrer spoofing that widespread? Is there another explanation? Any suggestions on dealing with it?

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@Eichhorn148

Referrers are only as trustworthy as the browser sending them. In other words they are wrong when:

Spammers use them
Crawlers get them wrong
Users add extensions to their browsers to change them (like this)
Browsers have bugs

The browser bug seems particularly likely to me. I think browsers often get their tabs crossed. I see referrers sent to my site that seem likely to be something that somebody has open in another tab.

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: Unreliable referrer filed? I have been looking at our Apache log file to find the sources of referrals to our website from online publications but there are a lot of hits that I can't explain.

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