Tag Archives: Spam

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Unintentionally Funny Spam

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Even with all the automated spam filtering that I have on both my e-mail and on the comments for the various blog sites I host, it is still annoying that spam gets through.

Having said that, every so often you get one that is quite funny, like the one I got this morning.

The people who sent it are fairly obviously using a simple phrase matching technique to post to what they think are relevant posts – sadly not in this case… That’s all the more surprising when you realise that whatever posted the comment got past the CAPTCHA test that gets given to anything the system thinks is dodgy – not that getting through mattered as I was able to boot the comment fairly swiftly when I found it. Perhaps some more time on the routine that selects relevant posts is needed…

Anyway, I digress. The blog post on which they commented was this one about clergy safety, highlighting the story of a vicar whose vicarage was machine-gunned. This is the comment that was posted (with the link removed obviously)…

I very much agree with what your article says. True enough, the use of dog collars such as no bark collars that are effective, humane and safe for controlling unwanted barking can be beneficial to your pet dogs.

So anyone else need to control unwanted barking from their vicar?

Computers/Technology, MobLog

Spam Attack

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We’ve just been the victim of a spam attack. Thankfully not on the weblog this time, but on one of the domains I host. The first I knew of it was when forty or so rejections and bounces from either non-existent addresses, or those addresses which operate a challenge/response system for spam protection, came through to my normal e-mail account – the ultimate destination for anything that can’t be delivered.

Looking through the logs on some of the bounces, what appears to have happened is that someone on an IP address in Korea has taken my domain name, attached a randomly generated name to the front, and then spammed probably thousands of addresses with one of those ‘submit your website to search engine’ type messages.

I really can’t see the purpose of the message though as there are no contact details or anything else in the e-mail aside from the phoney address on my domain. Whilst I can see the way people can make money from spam that actually sells something, I’ve never quite understood where the payoff comes on these messages.

Anyway, once I’d spotted the problem, I just set up a black hole that will just absorb all of the bounces rather than treating them as the other misaddressed mail and delivering it to me. Whilst it can’t stop the spammer, it at least deals with part of the mess that he/she/it left behind.

However, one amazing response that came through just before I activated the blackhole was the following:

From “Ann Shahin”
Subject RE: Your online sales are low because you don_t have enough visitors?
Date Tue, November 8, 2005 1:15 pm
To “Millicent”

——————————————————————————–

Whats the cost?

Ann Shahin
RE/MAX Home Sale Services
***-***-***

________________________________

From: Millicent [mailto:stavrok@***********]
Sent: Tue 11/8/2005 7:32 AM
To: info@sellingtheamericandream.com
Subject: Your online sales are low because you don_t have enough visitors?

Submitting your website in search engines may increase your online sales dramatically.

lf you invested time and money into your website, you simply MUST submit your website

online otherwise it wiII be invisibIe virtually ,which means efforts spent in vain.
If you want

peopIe to know about your website and boost your revenues, the onIy way to do that
is to

make your site visibIe in places where people search for information, i.e. submit your

website in multipIe search engines.

Since I’m amazed that anybody replies to this stuff anyway, and curious as to why they do, as she helpfully put her phone number on the e-mail, you don’t know how tempting it is to phone up and ask…

General

Big Site Updates

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You may have noticed over the past couple of days that the website is looking somewhat different. The primary reason for the change was as a result of a pretty nasty bout of trackback spam that occured over the first few days of the week with every single posting that allowed trackbacks being hit with multiple occurences plugging gambling sites.

Anyway, I’d been hearing good things about a couple of WordPress plugins, one called Spam Karma, that brought together a number of spam busting techniques, and the other, called Bad Behavior, took a different tack, in that it monitors the web requests, and identifies which are real people looking at the pages, and which are the automated spam bots that scan the internet looking for likely targets. Having spent a load of time removing the rubbish, I decided to check out the plugins.

This led to another problem, in that I hadn’t yet got round to upgrading WordPress from 1.2.2, as a result of the fairly heavy customisations I had made. So as of Wednesday I cleared the website down to nothing, and rebuilt it in WordPress 1.5.1.2, adding Bad Behavior and Spam Karma, hence the new look.

Thus far, the new version seems great, and a definite improvement. Plus I haven’t had to do any more clearing up thanks to Bad Behavior and Spam Karma.

Incidentally, if you want an indication of the size of the spam problem, the stats for both plugins are shown right at the very bottom of the page. As you can see, nothing has got through to Spam Karma yet, but that is because of the effectiveness of Bad Behavior, blocking hundreds of bots a day!