Spam chongqing

Our buddy, Alex, has been more busy with chongqing than I have recently. He discovered our Mr. Chongqing is on a network that is a huge email spammer too, CNCGROUP. We don't have any proof that EMMSS spams email too, but with the ammount of webspam he puts out it wouldn't suprise me if EMMSS is an email spammer too. But from looking up Mr. Chongqing's known IP addresses, he doesn't appear to be an email spammer himself. Maybe they have spammers specialized in each type and the unions won't let them cross over into the other's territory. ;-)

I am sure now that the CAN-SPAM Act went into effect yesterday I didn't get a message titled "BEST HARDCORE TEEN PORN SITE ON THE INTERNET!" without the magical "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT" in the subject line.

Oh, wait, I DID get that email today. And I am sure I will get something like that tomarrow, next week, and next year. I am not sure it falls under the CAN-SPAM Act, but I also got a spam for "V|AgR@", "Grow your manhood", and www.lapdate.info. Those are not really explicit, but its not stuff you want reaching a kid's inbox.

If 71% of spam comes from China, isn't it pretty stupid to believe that CAN-SPAM is going to fix anything.

I found this article from a post on Slashdot. Its about email spammers, but I think the conclusions apply to web spammers too.

Since the begining of the year they estimate a 30% to 40% increase in spam. And 71% of the spam they studied adertised sites that were based in China.

I just got an email from another supporter of our chongqing campaign. Alex's wiki had been hit several times by a couple different spammers (starting with our favorite, Mr. Chongqing) and he got sick of it. So when he googled for chonq and found us, we had an instant fan. Here is his original chongqing post.

Alex posted a quick PHP hack to block Mr. Chongqing's IP subnet at his blog. My favorite quote from his site is "Our little friend chongq hasn't shown himself anymore on the wiki, hope he'll bother other people instead of me (or throw himself off a cliff)." I vote for option number two.

After he blocked Mr. Chongqing, he had a new spammer vandalize his wiki. This new spammer is advertising 99986 dot com. I have seen a number of 99986 spams on different wikis, but so far it doesn't appear that he is nearly as bad as Mr. Chongqing. Of course he is also from China, his whois info says he is in Beijing. I wonder how long before we have to nominate him for a spammer case on Manni's list of the worst web spammers.

In my chongqing research I have found this spammer is hitting Guestbooks too. I figured that he would, just hadn't seen any till now. So in addition to cleaning up wikis, today I emailed a number guestbook owners to try and get him removed. I am sure after they see Manni's spammers page they will be glad to remove him.

In the process I have found that our Mr. Chongqing often calls himself "mr humor". We don't know for sure, but he said he was associated with humor dot com. The entire content of that site is ads from Overture. From his many guestbook spams his email address is often yaimok1@2911.net or yaimok2@2911.net.

Another source indicates emmss dot com seems to be a IT consulting site. I am sure our ranking up next to his is going to help him get customers :-).

Some more of Mr. Chongqing's favorite keywords: Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, China, 网站建设, and ÖØÇì

Here are some of Mr. Chongqing's IP addresses:

222.183.69.166
222.183.71.142
222.183.76.189
222.183.78.148
222.183.78.124 *his most common spamming IP
222.183.78.126
222.183.83.17
222.183.83.24
222.183.84.245

Our first blog supporter!!

IrishEyes

In other news:
I found that Mr. Chongqing had spammed his emmss links on the Chongqing page of the Wikipedia back in early March. They quickly noticed and blocked him, but not before Google crawled the page.

Emmss Vandalism (March 9-11): large scale spambot vandalism...

Disguising the spam link as relevant, he gave this description:

Chongqing Emmss Ecommerce (in Simplified Chinese): Build up E-Commerce website for enterprise.

I also found a good blacklist for Movable Type users:

MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse

Another Chinese spammer is hitting wikis and blogs, linking to bbs.qqfans dot com. So far its not wide spread, but qqfans dot com is definatly a repeat spammer. I found the qqfan spam when cleaning up emmss spam at a wiki. Even though they aren't our Wikis we have often cleaned what we can tell is for sure spam. Thats the good thing about an open system, anyone can undo the damage these wiki spammers are doing.

I first discovered qqfan at the Sandbox page of whatisflash.com. Then by accident I found that both he and our chongqing wiki spammer have been spamming commoncontent.org. That isn't even a Wiki or Blog. Its an open catalog of works licensed in under Creative Commons. This kind of spamming is less obvious and harder to clean up.

Just read about another example of SEO, this one just happens to be for less of a good cause. Its just an example of how Google needs to do something about search engine spamming. Google is a really good engine, but AltaVista used to be the top for years, then Yahoo. No engine lasts forever unless they keep advancing. So far Google is doing that, but with their recent IPO I, like many others, am worried that stock holder greed will push it to be just an Ad engine.

Here is the main contest site is at darkblue.com, and the Slashdot story about it nigritude ultramarine.

Yep, it looks like Mr. Chongqing has noticed our pages. 222.183.78.126 (which is within the range of IP addresses Mr. Chongqing uses to spam) visited both our sites this morning. My chongqing site got a hit from him twice this morning (6:55 and 7:11 am) using IE 6 on Win2k.

He came in from a Google search for emmss. I bet he was supprised and pissed. He has the top two results, we have results 3 and 5.

Update: It appears Mr. Chongqing paid me another visit tonight (11:16pm). I guess he likes my site.

Slashdot: India's Secret Army Of Online Ad 'Clickers'

Its kind of web spam related. It hurts everyone in the process. Companies will pay less for banner adds. Small site owners will receive less compensation. The Indian's are going to end up with carpal tunnel. And eventually someone will invent something far more annoying than popups to get around this.

In slightly related news "'MESOTHELIOMA ATTORNEY' the Most Expensive Keyword". I heard about that in the WSJ a few weeks ago. Check out other expensive keywords at Chris Garrett's blog.

Some "real hacker" hit our wiki yesterday. He is soo "l33t" he signed it "sn0oPy from morroco" (which isn't even how you spell Morocco) over and over and over. It must be really cool to show off that he was able to vandalize a site that requires no effort at all. He replaced the main page with what looked like political views of a pre-teen, written with all the finesse of a 5 year old repeated a bunch of times. English was definatly not his native language. Traceroute says this looser is from Amsterdam. It was caught really quickly, it stayed up a whole 15 minutes.

Manni just registered chongqed.org!

We are doing pretty good in Google for chongqing wiki spam. We are the 2nd and 4th results right now for those search words. The only one above me is a wiki history page where someone gave the link to the spam they removed. The one separating our sites also leaves links for the spammer even after the damage had been repaired. Its the change log of a despammed wiki page, but the log is still linking to 20 different emmss pages. That cleans the normally visible page in the wiki, but the spammer still gets what he wants since Google now sees the link in page history.

Both problems are how the change log and revision history pages are stored by the Wiki. They should not be readable by Google. Wiki program authors should add a noindex meta tag on this kind of pages. Wiki spam is becoming too prevalent to let these "backup" pages be indexed in search engines. This only encourage the spammers to vandalize wikis because even after cleaning up their damage, Google will see it in the revision histories for a month (depending on your Wiki software).

When Manni and I started off, our immediate goal was to knock emmss off the front page of results for "chongqing". Obviously that is still an important goal, but we are not limiting ourselves to this one spammer. He just happens to be the most annoying to us at the moment because he repeatedly hit a wiki we both work on.

Manni already has the next guy in need of a chongqing picked out: "He's more viscious than Mr. Chongqing because he doesn't simply add his links to wikis, but replaces existing ones."

We need your support to help us be successful in our chongqing campaign. Just like the spammers, we need links from other pages to increase our Google PageRank. Unlike them, we aren't going to spam wikis to get it.