Nuisance spamming
I checked my own moderated comments, and it looks like the spammers are now spamvertizing MANY different blog posts. Always three addresses, and each new comment has a new set of addresses.
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Remember my Pollution spamrun story?
I got an e-mail from Marco, who was on the receiving end of another spamrun. He was wondering if it was payback for him being involved in the anti-spam community, including writing anti-spam software.
What I found was that the spamrun was very similar to the spamrun that targeted Cosmicbuddha along with other sites. I’m guessing it’s the same outfit.
What’s the point? Maybe the spammers are afraid we’ll use automated tools for collecting spam and banning sites. Are they trying to muddy the waters?
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Update
I’ve found some earlier samples of this outfit’s spamming. One was on a rude website, so no link.
But you can search for these nonexistent domains:
dontevercallmyname2.com
dontevercallmyname3.org
Names that are used over and over:
Alexander Kolt
Peter Back
Nicolas Trumen
John Reed
I did find some spammy sites that MIGHT be associated with the spammer.
IP numbers around 69.90.xx.xx
Affiliate ID on one casino: itciia
Lots of intricate javascript on the pages.
The whois info on one domain points to Atlantida Marketing.
Remember that I’m speculating here. I don’t have proof that Atlantida Marketing is the spammer doing the nuisance spamming!
Thank you very much for posting about this issue!
If this is an attempt to disturb anti-spam tools they’re even more stupid than I imagined. I don’t know about WP’s anti-spam tools but the one I created for Pivot actually uses the centralized blacklist file as an absolute last resort. Comment spam is much easier to block by techniques such as Owen’s Spam Action, Elliott Back’s Hashcash or my own SpamQuiz technique (all three are available in Pivot-Blacklist besides the MT blacklist scan).
Hey, I’m just happy there’s sites like this to raise awareness among those most affected - please keep up the good work!
Thanks for the heads-up.
Thank you for the email. Someone else emailed me too, saying a person going by the last name of Dickerson was using my url. I put a post on my website letting people know and I replied to the one you told me about. Thanks again. So annoying!
Hi - this automated stuff was irritating me so much and captcha was geting out of control so i just wrote Puzil.com
The web service allows you to integrate it if you want otherwise it can host your comments and stuff.
There is also the Spam Summit this week - not heard anything out of that one yet though.
Nice service Steven! I’ve been thinking about creating something like that as well but it seems you beat me
Annoyed as I was with the recent nuisance spamruns I decided to take some extra revenge and extend my anti-spam ideas to WordPress. I created the question-thing you’ve got on Puzil.com as a WordPress plugin and I’ve ported my hardened-trackback protection scheme to WordPress as well. Both techniques originally from Pivot-Blacklist, the anti-spam suite I created for Pivot.
Anyone interested please check out
http://www.i-marco.nl/wp/wordpress/
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This blog spamming is terrible. I’ve been getting one every ~8 minutes for the last two days. Thanks for the help, Marco.
Been hit here too.
Not sure what the point of leaving other people’s URL in the post is, thats free adverts for the person being “victimized”.
Seems to be the latest attempt to get past spam filters. Spam Karma is holding its own on my site, though I am seeing a sudden uptick in the number trackback spams again. I suspect that is the reason for the blog entry URLs being included. They put their spam link in the author field, and reference somebody else’s blog in the comment text hoping to throw off the trackback spam checking tools I guess.
Silly thing is that they don’t seem to check whether their comments actually get posted - I have been getting between 50 and 100 attempts per day, and not one has actually made it onto the site. You’d have thought that they’d include something to test whether their scheme was working, and move on if a site blocks their spam.
Spammers work like shooting with schrapnel. You’ll always hit something and the fact that a lot of particles miss doesn’t matter because it doesn’t cost any money anyway. It’s way too much hassle for spammers to go and check every individual blog. Imagine, if you spam 5000 blogs and the spam gets posted on 300 of them after just running a tool for a couple of hours there’s no need to check anything. The spam run will have been succesful.
So when you Moderate a comment in WordPress and mark it as “spam”, does that do anything besides delete it? I have 369 of these little nuisances to delete.
Kevin:
When you mark it as spam, it’s removed from your blog and admin interface, but stays in the database. I’ve stopped marking as spam. I’ll do a backup of that part of the database, then delete the stuff outright instead. The point of that feature is that you can retain the evidence in the database, but no longer have to deal with it. It does cause some database bloat, though.