interview with a blog spammer (fwd)

[Justin Mason <jm...@jmason.org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/31/link_spamer_interview/

Key points:

- open proxies are widely used; so a proxy DNSBL like OPM or SORBS will
  have good results

- 'Will the initiative by Google, Yahoo and MSN, to honour "don't follow"
  links defeat Sam and his ilk? "I don't think it'll have much effect in
  the short, medium or long term. The search engines caused the problem" -
  we didn't quite follow this bit of logic, but Sam continued - "and
  they're doing this to placate the community. It won't work because most
  blogs and forms are set up with the best intentions, but when people
  find hard graft has to go into it they're left to rot. To use this,
  they'll all have to be updated. The majority won't be. And there'll just
  be trackback spamming."'

- 'So what does put a link spammer off? It's those trusty friends,
  captchas - test humans are meant to be able to do but computers can't,
  like reading distorted images of letters. "Even user authentication can
  be automated." (Unix's curl command is so wonderfully flexible.)  "The
  hardest form to spam is that which requires manual authentication such
  as captchas. Or those where you have to reply to an email, click on a
  link in it; though that can be automated too. Those where you have to
  register and click on links, they're hard as well.'

- 'And if you change the folder names where things usually reside, that's
  a challenge, because you just gather lists of installations' folder
  names."'

Some good info there -- esp. w.r.t. just changing the folder names!
(mind you that has no effect on the Chonquing-type manual spammers.)

--j.

Re: interview with a blog spammer (fwd)

[Matt Mullenweg <m...@mullenweg.com>]

Justin Mason wrote:
> - open proxies are widely used; so a proxy DNSBL like OPM or SORBS will
>   have good results

The WP plugin that does this has been moderately successful:

http://weblog.sinteur.com/index.php?p=8106

I don't know how many comments come from open proxies that aren't in one 
of the checked DNSRBLs.

> - 'Will the initiative by Google, Yahoo and MSN, to honour "don't follow"
>   links defeat Sam and his ilk? "I don't think it'll have much effect in
>   the short, medium or long term. The search engines caused the problem" -
>   we didn't quite follow this bit of logic, but Sam continued - "and
>   they're doing this to placate the community. It won't work because most
>   blogs and forms are set up with the best intentions, but when people
>   find hard graft has to go into it they're left to rot. To use this,
>   they'll all have to be updated. The majority won't be. And there'll just
>   be trackback spamming."'

This was the most non-sensical part of the interview. Blog systems that 
implement nofollow do the same for trackback links, at least the ones 
I've seen. Perhaps they're scared?

> - 'And if you change the folder names where things usually reside, that's
>   a challenge, because you just gather lists of installations' folder
>   names."'

We've found this to be of limited effectiveness, as the spambots are 
processing the comment page before hitting the post script, so renaming 
it doesn't do any good.

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
http://photomatt.net  | http://wordpress.org
http://pingomatic.com | http://cnet.com