Looking for holes on Myspace
Apparently, the spammers haven’t stopped looking for holes to exploit on myspace. I kept getting e-mails about “Tom” wanting to be my friend, but never saw a friend request waiting for me, so I wondered what that was about. I pondered that the name was pretty close to the Tom we all know - the one who’s everybody’s first friend.
Then I refreshed my home page, and saw there was another friend request just after I’d gotten through the list of existing ones - yep, it was Tom again.
And it was a porn spammer. I moved the mouse pointer over the profile, to see if there were any surprises, and found that the “about me” blurb was hyperlinked. Normally, any hyperlinks these days go to msplinks.com. Myspace substitutes any links going to outside sites, so that they can turn off links if they find they go to places they don’t like. But here was one place that seemed to have gotten past their substitution filters. So I checked it out. Here’s what they’d done:
I guess the real Tom needs to update his filters!
And it also shows you shouldn’t trust myspace even now that they’re fighting spam a lot better. I was able to mark that friend request as spam right away - kudos to Myspace for that!
The website was registered to
Galam, Ali adamfaraz@gmail.com
4415 St. Michaels Court
Sugar Land, Texas 77479
United States
(512) 772-4659
That’s a real address, BTW, but the phone number is a land line from Bastrop, Texas, and it’s WAY too far from Sugar Land to be the same exchange. Bastrop is closer to Austin, and Sugar Land is closer to Austin.
There’s no Ali Galam in Texas (that I can find), and no Adam Faraz.
The website is hosted at The Planet (DNS servers from Hostgator), and does a 301 redirect to an affiliate site with whois pointing to Jamaica.
Update: Looks like the spammers have discovered this hole en mass. I just noticed stalkertrack is back.
January 21st, 2008 at 10:42 am
Not quite true: Actually you can get a direct link from Myspam by registering as musician. The only check is for a valid email and once that’s confirmed you can benefit from Myspam’s PR rank (no strings attached, just a pure, oldschool link). Not quite clear why they make an exception here, this is literally begging for abuse. They should at least flag it as “nofollow” to signalise that this link is not meant as a vote for the referred website.
January 31st, 2008 at 7:55 pm
MySpace is a magnet for spammers. Sanford Wallace got busted by the FTC recently for creating over 11,000 fake profiles for sending spam-not only that he was able to get unauthorized access to over 300,000 more!
February 6th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
I haven’t been on Myspace in quite a while but I did notice that I’d get friend requests and then the profile would no longer exist. Hmm I’ve never heard of Sugar Land. I wonder if that’s where sugar comes from?
February 23rd, 2008 at 3:57 am
Actually, Sugar Land is closer to Houston than Austin… just sayin’…