Spam

Ever wanted to see how one of the many available (PMBlaster, Zunker, Xrumer etc.) forum spamming software looks and runs like ?

See Xrumer in action.

What’s interesting to see in the video above, from the point of view, is how the program works. The procedures, the checklists, the options, so you can build your own anti-spam blockade.

Some of you guys, will be amazed to see how captchas and/or math spam questions are like so … 1945.

Important: Please be aware that I do NOT endorse, NOR do I recommend the use of such spamming software, except for your own, personal and private use, to see how the program functions. As one user says in this WP article about Xrumer, you have to know the enemy and the weapons used by the enemy before you can defend against them.

Just go to the Harvard H2O Playlist Beta project, register an account and make a “Playlist”. Then point a link towards that page.

That way you get Wedding Favors and Lord of the Rings Online Guides and Exploits and not :

H2O playlists are more than just a cool, sleek technology — they represent a new way of thinking about education online. An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.

But wait there’s more : Dirspace directory (no offense intended to the owner, but that’s how directories “get” that SeoMoz PageStrength ?) and Viagra (of course through ezinearticles.com).

And this on top of my other posts about .edu spam:

• How to get unlimited links and content on a .edu domain
• .EDU Directory Spam - web.gcu.edu

Although it’s not fresh news, I thought it’s ok to mention that Barry reported VW to be hiding content in invisible DIV tags. We all remember the BMW Spam.

Kevin Gough, Sr. Product & Marketing Manager at Google “contacted the VW team” and asked questions. Now how many times will a Google representative kindly ask you some questions whenever someone else spams ? Let me tell you: never :)

I lived to see this day come to bear .. Myspace sending SPAM “member” emails, to an email address, that doesn’t exist (bliggy[at]bliggs.com), on one of my domains.

All the headers are legit, and the “member” email is sent to a “confirmed email”. Go figure guys.

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Each day I’m getting so many spam comments, with links to files hosted on .edu domains. I am wondering, how are these people getting access to them ? Most of the time they put a certain URL in their comment URL field, as well as in the body, that lead to redirects to porn websites. Here is an example :

The .edu link above redirects to : http://italianpiacere.com/ (warning, it’s p0rn).

Why aren’t these things under control ? I found spam on .edu domains in the past too. On a much greater scale.

I decided to see how the heck this(ese) dude(s) managed to do this spam. It’s EASY. Just go to cdm.berkeley.edu which is a Wiki. Click on upload file (lower left toolbar) and there you go. Have a look at that SPAM and p0rn. As a total unauthorised person, you can upload any file, link to it, redirect it, etc.

The amount of spam generated in this way on .edu domains is unacceptable. Schools should REALLY enforce security on what their students can do (if this was done by a student). Or maybe the whole subdomain + the wiki (not just the upload of pages) were created by someone with access to the servers, with the sole reason in mind, to spam.

Unbelievable right ? Well you better believe it: Yahoo! Directory is cloaking, and is spamming :)
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So going trough my usual daily e-mails, I find this :

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I just hit the 10.000 spam comments mark in an aprox. 6 months time span.. I don’t think if this is a good thing (because Akismet caught 99% of the 10.000 spam comments) or a bad thing (because only 5% of all the comments I received are from real humans).

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Using a site: search, Google brings pages that stopped existing on my server one year ago, and puts them as supplemental results …

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It was just a matter of time before my blog became a target too.

Some punk-ass wanna-be dude has stolen my 5 Google Adsense Secrets, Tips and Tricks article and shamesly copied it on his blog, WORD BY WORD. You have some images below:

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So Bobby pointed this to me. A nice find on how to spam Google and get billions of pages indexed, with a 3 week-old domain.

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The MSDN Blogs network is full of spam too. The only problem is that the owners of the blogs don’t give a …. about that. It’s Microsoft man.. You would think they have the resources to keep the blogs clean. Geez’.

Concrete example of Lisa Woll’s blog spam (randomly chosen blog), old and new: post and post.

So each and every one of you who found this .edu free directory, Grand Canyon University Web Resources (my ass, and more like Grand Canyon University SPAM Resources), think again about submitting your website there.

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So i get about 3-4 SPAM e-mails (on different e-mail accounts i own) from a romanian company named MondoPay, presumeably the FIRST Internet pay system in Romania(that’s what they say). How lame can that be ?

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So until today I was getting about 20 to 30 spam comments per day. It really annoyed me, so I started looking for a spam keyword list for Wordpress (or just a damn plain word list to copy/paste in Wordpress).
So just tumpling to my Wordpress admin, in Options/Discussions, I came upon the Common spam words link. I must say a decent list resides there, but … almoust useless. To small for all the spam words used today.

In the same page (on Wordpress.org website), I found a reference to a certain module for Wordpress, named Akismet. I must say it’s amazing.

Just a single php file (akismet.php), that you need to upload in your Wordpress path at the /wp-content/plugins/ directory. Then make an account at Wordpress.com and get an API key (sent in your mail after you confirm the account and your e-mail).

Then just activate your module, and enter the sent API key.

What this plugin does, is that it actually learnes from you. You mark what comment you want, as spam, and the plugin learns from the words and user information in that comment.

After just 10 or 15 marked comments by me, with vi.gra, tra.adol, ci.lis, diaz.pam, blo.job and other spam keywords, it actually scannes and finds 100% of spam comments.

It’s a GREAT addition to every moderatly/heavy commented blog, and it saved me lots of usefull minutes each day.

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days.

For many people, Akismet will greatly reduce or even completely eliminate the comment and trackback spam you get on your site. If one does happen to get through, simply mark it as “spam” on the moderation screen and Akismet will learn from the mistakes. If you don’t have a WordPress.com account yet, you can get one at WordPress.com.