Junks in apache access_log?

Question

I am hosting a small test website in ec2 and there should be only 2-3 test users with valid login to my server. However, I am seeing a lot of junk logs in my apache access_log( /var/log/httpd/access_log):

198.2.208.231 - - [13/Dec/2013:21:11:07 +0000] "GET http://ib.adnxs.com/ttj?id=1995383&position=above HTTP/1.0" 302 - "http://www.minbusiness.net/?p=611" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16"

173.234.32.69 - - [13/Dec/2013:21:11:07 +0000] "GET http://ads.creafi-online-media.com/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=728x90,468x60&section=5172215&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" 302 - "http://lookfashionstyle.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=42&Itemid=98&limitstart=24" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; WINDOWS; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

198.136.31.98 - - [13/Dec/2013:21:11:07 +0000] "GET http://ad.tagjunction.com/st?ad_type=ad&ad_size=468x60&section=4914662&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" 302 - "http://www.benzec.com" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.0.13) Gecko/2009073022 Firefox/3.0.13"

....

Not exactly sure what's going on... Am I being attacked?

thanks!

Answer 1

One possibility is that your server is configured as an open proxy and some ad scams are proxying traffic through it to hide their real origin.

Answer 2

There is alot of bots around the web attempting all kinds of exploits, I spawned my web server just yesterday and already received lots of spamming/exploit attempts. Like the ones in the thread I've just created ( and not only, quite a few others.. Cloudflare is helping but it doesn't catch it all, at least not in the free version, which is what I am using to get some protection):

Exploit Attempts in nginx access log, Some logs without IP, what to do about it?