Monday, March 28, 2005
Spamming for the Lord
Spam Kings Blog's post:
What's a minister doing in the SpecialHam.com spammer forum? You might hope he was proselytizing the spammers into giving up their evil ways. No such luck. Roy Giles was just looking for help with his spamware program and some proxies.
Read the rest.
What's a minister doing in the SpecialHam.com spammer forum? You might hope he was proselytizing the spammers into giving up their evil ways. No such luck. Roy Giles was just looking for help with his spamware program and some proxies.
Read the rest.
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Spamming Experiment
Kasia at unix-girl.com decided to run a spamming experiment on her blog. She posted a couple spams to her own blog and waited to see what would happen. In less than 24 hours she received 356 more spams.
We didn't test it as scientifically, but Manni and I discovered the same thing on our wiki. We keep a lot of spammer URLs there for informational purposes and discussion (as text only so they Google doesn't see them as links). I also had a page where I was holding loads of spam taken from many spammed sites before I got around to studying and chongqing them. We then started to see spammers would spam those pages with referrers from Google searching for a specific spammer domain, often not their own. Those temporary pages have turned into really good spam honey pots for us.
When a spammer can find a page with existing spam through Google they know that site is probably not well monitored or cleaned so they know it’s a good place to spam. If you have a blog, wiki, or guestbook it is important to clean any spam you get. If you don't you are just inviting more and more spam.
We didn't test it as scientifically, but Manni and I discovered the same thing on our wiki. We keep a lot of spammer URLs there for informational purposes and discussion (as text only so they Google doesn't see them as links). I also had a page where I was holding loads of spam taken from many spammed sites before I got around to studying and chongqing them. We then started to see spammers would spam those pages with referrers from Google searching for a specific spammer domain, often not their own. Those temporary pages have turned into really good spam honey pots for us.
When a spammer can find a page with existing spam through Google they know that site is probably not well monitored or cleaned so they know it’s a good place to spam. If you have a blog, wiki, or guestbook it is important to clean any spam you get. If you don't you are just inviting more and more spam.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Spammer's Keywords for Google
A spammer has been hitting the chongqed wiki several times over the last few weeks. Each seperate attack its a different domain that isn't in our blacklist yet so they aren't blocked automatically. His IP has always been 82.77.137.102 so he could be blocked easily, but its useful to learn from him. His URLs so far were: keydo.net, jd9.net, free22.net. He is getting a bit annoying; you would think he would realize its not a good idea to spam an antispam wiki.
And these are a few of the keywords from his spam:
And these are a few of the keywords from his spam:
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Spam Huntress talks with friendly spammer
Spam Huntress has been discussing things with a "friendly spammer." Well, I am not sure he is actually friendly, but Halz used that term so I will go with it. This admitted spammer thinks he has the solution to solve blog spam and wants to share it with antispammers.
I suspect he thinks he has some real good ideas to prevent spam, but just because he is a spammer doesn't mean he is an expert at knowing how to prevent spam. There are a lot of great solutions to web spam, but most are inconvienant or totally unwanted by users. CAPTCHAs are annoying and only work against automated spamming. Redirects and nofollow means that even legitimate links do not recieve any PageRank influence. I don't really see a big problem with that on blog comments, but apparently many bloggers do. Most wiki users hate it too, though Wikipedia is using it.
What he doesn't get is spammers are morons. Maybe he isn't, but he also isn't the usual Chinese spammer who probably gets paied a few dollars for a day's worth of spamming. We have lots of spammers hit our wiki and many work really hard to get around our spam prevention methods. Usually by posting a text only URL which is not useful for PageRank or getting hits.
I suspect he thinks he has some real good ideas to prevent spam, but just because he is a spammer doesn't mean he is an expert at knowing how to prevent spam. There are a lot of great solutions to web spam, but most are inconvienant or totally unwanted by users. CAPTCHAs are annoying and only work against automated spamming. Redirects and nofollow means that even legitimate links do not recieve any PageRank influence. I don't really see a big problem with that on blog comments, but apparently many bloggers do. Most wiki users hate it too, though Wikipedia is using it.
What he doesn't get is spammers are morons. Maybe he isn't, but he also isn't the usual Chinese spammer who probably gets paied a few dollars for a day's worth of spamming. We have lots of spammers hit our wiki and many work really hard to get around our spam prevention methods. Usually by posting a text only URL which is not useful for PageRank or getting hits.
Friday, March 18, 2005
SFGate: Free iPod -- um, not really
The article starts:
- From the "No Free Lunch" file, let's take a look one of the more widespread offers circulating online for a free Apple iPod.
LWS Spammer Followup
Remember when David, TheGunOwner of LWS replied to a complaint about one of his members (December 18, 2004):
It didn't take long, the interesting site detailing all kinds of bad stuff about TGO was replaced with an apology. Just in case you missed reading that masterpiece at the original location, it can still be found here, here, or here.
- I see what is going on. Thanks for the information, i'll deal with it accordingly and make sure everything stops. I sincerely apologize that your and other blogs were spammed. As someone who owns a very large forum, believe me when I say I hate spammers as much as the next guy.
It didn't take long, the interesting site detailing all kinds of bad stuff about TGO was replaced with an apology. Just in case you missed reading that masterpiece at the original location, it can still be found here, here, or here.
Slashdot: Spammers Sue Spam Victim For $4 Million
A web hosting and email provider, has been sued for just under $4 million by a spammer after they were ordered to stop sending him emails and comply with Oklahoma's CAN-SPAM act. See Slashdot for more.
Spammers are just evil!
Spammers are just evil!
Wired makes SEO spam sound good
Wired just did an article on SEO spammers, Search Rank Easy to Manipulate. It made it seem as though the spammer is doing nothing wrong by spamming blogs and guestbooks, they are just taking advantage of search engine loop holes. It doesn't even mention wikis. I hit the send feedback link and sent this:
- This article makes what SEOs do sound perfectly acceptable. White hat optimization such as designing your own page to work better is fine. But tricking search engines is bad for users of those search engines. Would you rather go to a popular relevant site to buy a product or go to the one that has done the most SEO tricks? Tricking search engines alone is not good, but when they start to spam innocent people's sites to get more links its really going too far.
These spammers are ruining blogs, wikis, and guestbooks. This is not only annoying to other visitors it wastes a lot of time for the maintainers of the site to clean them up. If they are not cleaned up it only encourages other SEO spammers to attack the same site because they know its not going to be cleaned. Most wiki spammers replace the entire page of content when they spam. A few spammers threaten they will destroy the wiki if their spam is removed. I have even seen guestbook spammers hit a memorial page for Princess Diana. These people have no morals.
A lot of open source projects use wikis for their program documentation. They are often sites with a good amount of PageRank so make them frequent targets of spammers. Many of them end up having to be password protected because the attacks just become too much. Passwording dicourages users from contributing and hurts the growth of wikis, but spammers often leave no other choice.
Last week, RichardP, a very active wiki spam fighter recieved a death threat from a spammer because of his automated spam removal program: http://www.nooranch.com/synaesmedia/wiki/wiki.cgi?SpammingThoughtStorms
I hope you can do a follow up article on this topic from the victim's point of view. People know all about email spam, but most have no clue what is going on with web spam. Blog spam got a good deal of coverage over a year ago and little has been reported about it since. That is partly because blog software has improved to make spamming harder, less productive, and easier to block. But because of the open nature of wikis, they can't use the really effective prevention methods.
Monday, March 14, 2005
Online Poker Googlebomb
Slashdot has a story on bloggers fighting back by Googlebombing the online poker Wikipedia article for the phrase "online poker". Its already number three in the rankings.
That's exactly the idea behind chongqing. Except we also make sure visitors to the page know about the spamming for that keyword and who has been doing it.
In the comments a lot of people don't seem to understand the point of this. Some even suggest Google should step in and stop it. Obviously these people are not blog owners. It would be great if Google would stop this, if they were able to they would also be stopping the effectiveness of blog and wiki spam in the process. Just because this Googlebomb isn't likely to stop any spammers it still has meaning. It is getting the message out; a lot of people don't have any clue these spammers are a real problem. I support this Googlebomb.
That's exactly the idea behind chongqing. Except we also make sure visitors to the page know about the spamming for that keyword and who has been doing it.
In the comments a lot of people don't seem to understand the point of this. Some even suggest Google should step in and stop it. Obviously these people are not blog owners. It would be great if Google would stop this, if they were able to they would also be stopping the effectiveness of blog and wiki spam in the process. Just because this Googlebomb isn't likely to stop any spammers it still has meaning. It is getting the message out; a lot of people don't have any clue these spammers are a real problem. I support this Googlebomb.
Monday, March 07, 2005
WikiBlackList Blog Stolen
I just discovered that some spammer took over the WikiBlackList blog in late January. Before that it was inactive for 5 or 6 months, maybe the site just expired or the original author deleted the page. Either way, it now has some nonsense text and spammy links. A lot of WikiSpam pages link to that site since it used to have some useful antispam information. If you see any links to that site please remove them (and leave a comment explaining why so its not reverted as vandalizm). The spammer already has a PageRank of 3 by stealing the blog. Hopefully we can fix that real quick.
