: How does Google prevent GA accounts from being spammed Since the Google Analytics snippet is available in the source code of the page (e.g. below is stackexchange's) <script type="text/javascript">var

@RJPawlick198

Posted in: #GoogleAnalytics #GoogleAnalyticsSpam #Hacking #Spam #SpamPrevention

Since the Google Analytics snippet is available in the source code of the page (e.g. below is stackexchange's)

<script type="text/javascript">var _gaq=_gaq||[];_gaq.push(['_setAccount','UA-5620270-24']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName','.stackexchange.com']);
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 2, 'accountid', '148108',2]);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
var _qevents = _qevents || [];
(function(){
var s=document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
var ga=document.createElement('script');
ga.type='text/javascript';
ga.async=true;
ga.src='http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga,s);
var sc=document.createElement('script');
sc.type='text/javascript';
sc.async=true;
sc.src='http://edge.quantserve.com/quant.js';
s.parentNode.insertBefore(sc,s);
})();
</script>


I was wondering how Google were preventing people's GA accounts from being spammed. For instance I could modify my /etc/hosts file to point webmasters.stackexchange.com to a server of mine, then on that server I create few dummy webpages with the above GA code, and I could use an automated browser like Selenium to continuously browse these pages and execute the GA code which would generate plenty of requests from my browser to GA.

How does Google prevent people's GA account statistics from being spammed?

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