{"id":446,"date":"2005-01-31T17:10:12","date_gmt":"2005-01-31T21:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tradermike.net\/movethecrowd\/2005\/01\/interview_with_a_link_comment_spammer\/"},"modified":"2005-01-31T17:10:12","modified_gmt":"2005-01-31T21:10:12","slug":"interview_with_a_link_comment_spammer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2005\/01\/31\/interview_with_a_link_comment_spammer\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with a Link \/ Comment Spammer"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Register interviewed a link spammer<\/a> who revealed some of his methods and motivation. The bottom line — spammers can make up to seven figure incomes from some simple computer code. Some key points:<\/p>\n

\nFor even a semi-competent programmer, writing programs that will link-spam vulnerable websites and blogs is pretty easy. All you need is a list of blogs – which again, even a semi-competent programmer will be able to pull together (by searching for sites with keywords such as “WordPress”, “Movable Type” and “Blogger”) a huge list of blogs to hit.<\/p>\n

And people like Sam are much more than competent. “You could be aiming at 20,000 or 100,000 blogs. Any sensible spammer will be looking to spam not for quality [of site] but quantity of links.” When a new blog format appears, it can take less than ten minutes to work out how to comment spam it. Write a couple of hundred lines of terminal script, and the spam can begin. But you can’t just set your PC to start doing that. It’ll get spotted by your ISP, and shut down; or the IP address of your machine will be blocked forver by the targeted blogs.<\/p>\n

So Sam, like other link spammers, uses the thousands of ‘open proxies’ on the net. These are machines which, by accident (read: clueless sysadmins) or design (read: clueless managers) are set up so that anyone, anywhere, can access another website through them. Usually intended for internal use, so a company only needs one machine facing the net, they’re actually hard to lock down completely.<\/p>\n

By this Sam means spammers setting up their own blogs, and referencing posts on zillions of blogs, which will then incestuously point back to the spammer, whose profile is thus raised. 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.)<\/p>\n

“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.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Register interviewed a link spammer who revealed some of his methods and motivation. The bottom line — spammers can make up to seven figure incomes from some simple computer code. Some key points: For even a semi-competent programmer, writing programs that will link-spam vulnerable websites and blogs is pretty easy. All you need is… Continue reading Interview with a Link \/ Comment Spammer<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7,16],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":45,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2003\/07\/01\/blogrolling_buying_readers\/","url_meta":{"origin":446,"position":0},"title":"BlogRolling & Buying Readers","date":"July 1, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Dean has a very good post about blogrolling, and blogging in general. In the post, he discusses how and why bloggers 'buy' readers through linking and blogrolling. I've recently trimmed my own blogroll because it was getting too long, and because I've started using a newsreader. So most of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":220,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2003\/10\/15\/james_sengs_bayesian_filter_for_fighting_blog_spam\/","url_meta":{"origin":446,"position":1},"title":"James Seng’s Bayesian Filter for Fighting Blog Spam","date":"October 15, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Let me first say that James Seng is the man! A few days ago he provided the world with his excellent CAPTCHA-based spam solution for Movable Type blogs. Now he's created another spam blocker which uses a Bayesian filter. This new filter works on TrackBacks too. I like the idea\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":425,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2004\/12\/12\/mt-blacklist_corrections_and_suggestions\/","url_meta":{"origin":446,"position":2},"title":"MT-Blacklist Corrections and Suggestions","date":"December 12, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"In case you haven't seen it already, there's an important post about some changes to the MT-Blacklist master blacklist on Jay Allen's site. Jay gives some suggestions about some expressions and URL Patterns to add to your blacklist. As an aside, I'm still trippin' off of the amount of comment\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":120,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2003\/07\/28\/hip-hop_blogs\/","url_meta":{"origin":446,"position":3},"title":"Hip-Hop Blogs","date":"July 28, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"For hip-hop related blogs check out HipHopAnonymous' running list of hip-hop blogs. (via Diesel Nation)","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging"","img":{"alt_text":"Shop at Amazon.com","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rcm-images.amazon.com\/images\/G\/01\/rcm\/468x240.gif?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":187,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2003\/09\/11\/glenns_blogging_epiphany\/","url_meta":{"origin":446,"position":4},"title":"Glenn’s Blogging Epiphany","date":"September 11, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"If you're not reading Glenn's blog, Hi, I'm Black, you're missing some great stuff. He's been on a roll of late & I've been meaning to link to several of his posts. But since I've been slacking off of late I haven't had a chance to do so. Today he\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":362,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2004\/07\/26\/technoratis_convention_bloggers_coverage\/","url_meta":{"origin":446,"position":5},"title":"Technorati’s Convention Bloggers Coverage","date":"July 26, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Technorati, which is sporting a new design, has a new feature which is tracking the Democratic convention bloggers, as well as other bloggers from the Right and the Left. It's formatted in a 3 column layout a la WatchBlog. It looks like a good way to keep up with what's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}