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August 17, 2007
Spammer update
Following on from my post of yesterday, I have tried to identify what the posts targeted have in common that would attract a spambot. I am a little disturbed at what I find. Now I know this is not scientific, and I know there is probably some other mechanism at work - I certainly hope so - but I'm sure that this is a part of it. A computer software friend tells me that the fact that all the spam has the same series of false e-mail addresses means it is probably coming from a computer that has been cloned. In short, some corporation out there has had their computer taken over by someone else to run this spamming programme and doesn't seem to be aware that they are hosting a rogue programme. That is a bit scary.
Secondly, looking through the most commonly targeted posts I found they have the following words in common, though, obviously, not all of the words appear in all of the posts.
love,
youth,
parents,
leisure,
pleasure,
city,
politics and politicians,
children,
adults,
discipline,
crime,
punishment,
Jesus Christ,
God,
faith,
Church,
religion and religious.
The list is quite extensive and that is a sample. Obviously not all of the words appear in all of the posts, but enough are "common" to make me wonder what the spammer who set this up is trying to push. One of the worst hit posts is "Guest Post" which has a large selection of words in it which appear to be common to all the other posts that are being hit - and one very disturbing aspect is the post that I put up only four days ago, entitled "Letting go" is already a prime target for this scum. Why am I disturbed by this? Primarily because it has a number of the key words including "Parents", "children", "parenting", "teaching" and "love" among others. Could it be that this purveyor of porn is trying to target children or sell child pornography?
And yesterdays post was hit within hours .....
Regretably I will be forced to close down the comments on that post if this continues - I have already had to close comments on a very large number of older ones, a time consuming and very annoying task at the best of times. Equally obvious is the fact that accessing the MuNu server is becoming very difficult at times - and a quick check shows me that the number of spam comments arriving in my "Approval" bin coincide with these periods. Draw your own conclusions.
One of my more radically inclined friends has suggested that the whole spam bot thing is actually being run by various government secret services in an effort to drive bloggers out of the internet. Frankly, I doubt any civil servant would have the wit or the ability anywhere in the world, they are parasites, not original thinkers wherever they are. But I certainly wouldn't put it past some of our political masters and media barons to want to try it. After all, while there are many blogs that don't rock the boat, there are many more that do publish reports and information our politicians and media do not want publicised. A nice theory anyway.
My own feeling is that this is simply a mafia style operation being run from a convenient Developing Country and designed to make money for its originators. Pity it has to be so difficult to beat and so damned irritating.
Posted by The Gray Monk at August 17, 2007 06:11 AM
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Comments
With help from some fellow bloggers, I shut down the comments after 7 days. It really helps.
Posted by: vw bug at August 17, 2007 12:45 PM
Val, thanks for that, I am trying to get that rigged. Already though, the old fashioned approach is having an impact!
Posted by: The Gray Monk at August 17, 2007 04:14 PM
I have had Akismet Spam since January, and it has already filtered out over 115,000 such spams. It's great. The only ones that get through now, and rarely in brand new posts, seem to have Blogger URLs and are almost exclusively of a pharmaceutical nature.
Posted by: Seth at August 18, 2007 12:17 AM