Steve
I'm a PC, so shut up
Consultant
join:2001-03-10
Yorba Linda, CA
| New weblog spamming technique
Well everybody says that spammers are stupid, but that doesn't rule out "resourceful". There's a new technique out there: "spam piggybacking".
Comments pointing directly to spam sites are usually deleted right away, either by the blog owner or by automated means, and the tools for dealing with comment spam have been getting better.
But not everybody deletes blog spam, so the spammers have picked up on this: rather than post to their sites directly, they now post links to the should-have-been-removed comments in the weblogs run by these irresponsible operators.
I first heard about this when Kasia mentioned this in her weblog, and you'd figure that the guilty parties would be more clueless than your average bear.
This is probably true in the general case, but while researching this I found a surprisingly clueless operator: the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. I analyzed 9 weblogs with 9103 comments, and only 68 of those comments could be argued to be not spam. This yields an astonishing 99.25% spam rate.
The worst offender is Stefan Bechtold, whose weblog has 12 "good" comments out of 4950. He seems quite shameless about it too: said by his weblog in April:
I am sorry for all the comment spam that floods my (and other) blogs. However, this problem will be solved in a few weeks with an update of Movable Type at the CIS. I am deleting some of the most embarrassing spam, but I don’t have the time to do this for all of the spam. So stay tuned and look forward to a comment-spam-free blog world.
So he sees it's a problem yet still allows new comments. Movable Type is not that hard to use - this fellow really doesn't belong on the internet.
In case anybody is thinking "So what? It's their own weblog that's getting trashed": the spammers are not so much targetting the weblogs themselves, but instead are targetting Google. By creating these links to links to links, they are trying to earn higher page ranking. Many of the comments explicitly mention page ranking.
I can't post a table here, but I have one in my weblog that shows the per-user stats.
»www.unixwiz.net/archives/2004/08···ple.html
These people at Stanford Law are supposed to be the cutting-edge thinkers on internet topics, and if they can't even get their arms around "spam", I think this says we have a very long way to go.
It's depressing.
--
Stephen J. Friedl * Security Consultant * Tustin, California USA * my web site |
|
Steve
I'm a PC, so shut up
Consultant
join:2001-03-10
Yorba Linda, CA
| It seems that Stefan Bechtold's solution to this was to wholesale delete all comments, valid or not.
But new comments are still allowed, so it's probably just a matter of time before new spam arrives.
Steve
--
Stephen J. Friedl * Security Consultant * Tustin, California USA * my web site |
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Dennis
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| reply to Steve
perhaps having lot's of comment's, with little or no relevance, made him feel more important.
I know, I can't sleep, eat, or drink when I know there's spam in my blog....
--
I want to be different, just like everybody else.
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Poincare
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| reply to Steve
They disabled comments.
»cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/bechtold/
"Comment spam
After Steve Friedl has published a shocking statistic about comment spam at CIS blogs, comments have now been disabled. We are still waiting for a central update of our MT installation which will hopefully provide a long-term solution to this problem.
posted by [ Stefan ] on [ Aug 3 04 at 9:59 AM ] [ No trackbacks ] " |
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