Redirects in webspam
I haven’t blogged much about webspam lately. Akismet kills most of it, so I’m not as annoyed.
But enter a new Wordpress installation. It took a few week for the first spam to arrive, and then I attracted a regular. Geez, that’s annoying. I hadn’t had time to do something about the spam yet, but it was starting to annoy me enough I took a closer look.
What I found was a lot of redirects to spammy sites from innocent third parties. Many of them from Bitrix installations, but judging from the URL’s, there are plenty of other susceptible redirect scripts. Here’s a sampling of code you could block in blog and forum software, and that would silently get rid of a lot of spam posts:.
external.php?url=http://
go.cgi?dest=http://
go.asp?url=http://
link.php?url=http://
links_ext.pl?http://
out.php?url=http://
rd?t=http://
redirect.cfm?trgturl=http://
redirect.php?goto=http://
redirect.php?url=http://
Another bad thing about these scripts, is that you could pick up a trojan by going to a site you thought was safe, if you didn’t notice that there was a redirect actually pointing somewhere else than the safe site the redirect script is sitting on.
I use this plugin on every wordpress install I manage:
http://www.hybrid6.com/webgeek/plugins/wp-spamfree
So far, I’ve not had any (really absolutely none) since I installed it. The “blocked” counter on my dashboard keeps going up though (now at 1,135 spam comments for my personal blog)
Hope that’s useful!
Hi,
sorry for the dumb question.. but how can I block above redirects?
@Kirrus
Javascript and cookies used to stop spam bots a couple of years ago, today it only stops some of the cheap spammers.
I have one of redirect-script at one of my servers, but I have built in protection against abuse in it
As soon as it is used for spam or abusive use it will stop working for those url.
I also managed a site that had a short url service, is was abused by a large spamming company. Our system stopped several thousand redirects after the url had been spammed to thousands of inocents. I was shocked that so many people still are clicking spam links in email, they are feeding the spammers money!