Until now, antispam developers and their products have played defense only. But now, one activist wants spam filters to automatically launch attacks against suspected spammers’ sites to shut them down.

Fearing that spammers are increasingly finding ways to slip their unwanted messages past the current generation of filtering technologies, activists are taking a second look at a proposal to use denial-of-service attacks in the fight against spam.

Such attacks, which are illegal and can disrupt a company’s communications network by burying its servers in unnecessary requests, have traditionally been associated with pranksters who use viruses to distribute their attack software on thousands of computers.

Under the proposal, which was initially published in August by antispam activist Paul Graham, the attacks would be launched automatically by the next generation of spam filters. The attacks would be initiated whenever the filters received a new piece of spam containing a Web link. Read the rest of this entry »

If the maturity of a Web technology can be measured by the amount of attention spammers pay to it, then blogging has definitely come of age.

After a wave of aggressive spam attacks this month, bloggers suddenly found themselves scrambling for antispam weaponry and confronting the questions that have bedeviled e-mail and Usenet for years. How much openness can blogs afford? What freedoms are bloggers willing to trade to keep spammers out?

The problem of blog spam is not entirely new. Last year “referral marketers” began inserting their clients’ URLs into bloggers’ referral logs. Around the same time, bloggers began reporting spam occasionally popping up in the public comments on their sites.

Until recently, however, comment spam posed little more than an occasional nuisance. But after blogger Jay Allen saw spammers hit 120 of his posts over the course of four days, he knew the problem had reached a new level of urgency.

“I realized that day that we were facing a new predator in the jungle, and if we didn’t adapt ? and quickly ? it would be having us for dinner,” he said.

The latest wave of spam attacks focused on

Six Apart’s popular
Movable Type publishing system, whose built-in comments do not require registration and allow bloggers to block comments only by IP address ? a restriction spammers can easily avoid. “Movable Type’s comment system is extremely open, which is incredible for a community tool, but unfortunately also highly susceptible to abuse,” Allen said. Read the rest of this entry »

SpamArchive.org is a community resource that provides a database of known spam to be used for testing, developing, and benchmarking anti-spam tools.

The goal of this project is to provide a large repository of spam that can be used by researchers and tool developers. In the past, there were a few small personal spam archives that were used. There was no large set of spam that could be used to test new anti-spam algorithms.

Thus, developers could not sufficiently test their techniques across a range of messages. Also, the lack of a “standard” sample of spam made it difficult to effectively benchmark anti-spam tools.

The problem of unsolicited e-mail has been increasing for years, but help has arrived. In this article, David discusses and compares several broad approaches to the automatic elimination of unwanted e-mail while introducing and testing some popular tools that follow these approaches.

The problem of unsolicited e-mail has been increasing for years, but help has arrived. In this article, David discusses and compares several broad approaches to the automatic elimination of unwanted e-mail while introducing and testing some popular tools that follow these approaches.

Unethical e-mail senders bear little or no cost for mass distribution of messages, yet normal e-mail users are forced to spend time and effort purging fraudulent and otherwise unwanted mail from their mailboxes. In this article, I describe ways that computer code can help eliminate unsolicited commercial e-mail, viruses,
trojans, and worms, as well as frauds perpetrated electronically and other undesired and troublesome e-mail. In some sense, the final and best solution for eliminating spam will probably take place on a legal level. In the meantime, however, you can do some things from a code perspective that can serve as an interim solution to the problem, until (if ever) the laws begin to evolve at the same rate as public frustration. Read the rest of this entry »

Spam. We’re reading about it everywhere now and we’re not talking potted meat. It’s the kind that clogs up your email box every day trying to sell you everything including the moon.
Well I have a special treat for you. An interview with the “spam king”.
Of course, that’s not his real name. He’s afraid to divulge that for obvious reasons. This person started using spam as a marketing method in the late 90’s sending out 100’s of thousands of emails a day and he kindly offered to tell us about how he does his dirty deeds.

Wade ? Thanks for joining us today. What got you into the spam marketing industry?

SK ? Money, pure and simple. Of course more people willing to spend money on the Internet really got things going. It wasn’t until about 2 years ago that mass email blasting got effective although I’ve been spamming for years.

Wade ? How many people do you send email too?

SK ? Oh, I’ve cut back a bit but anywhere between 300,000 to 800,000 a day. I’m a small time operator. The big time guys are sending out 10 times that number every day. Read the rest of this entry »

Posting an email address in a public place is not an invitation for companies to send unsolicited advertisements. Hosting a public Web forum or Usenet server does not give companies permission or the moral right to advertise on it. And soliciting comments from the public on a weblog entry or other Web page does not mean that companies or individuals are invited to use it for their advertising purposes.

Usenet news succumbed to spam long ago. Email was next. Now spammers have turned their attention to weblogs and comment forms. In order to increase search engine rankings you are posting advertisements to our Web pages. What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better connected, and more technologically savvy than the average email user. We control the medium that you are now attempting to exploit. You’ve picked a fight with us and it’s a fight you cannot win.

We have complained amongst ourselves, tried technological solutions, and tried to understand the nature of comment spam. And we are done. We now intend to fight back. Read the rest of this entry »

Anti-Comment Spam Tactics

What can you do to stop blog spamming? Below I have posted some methods that I have collected in the www. The layout is the following: first the description and second the links to the installation and documentation (always at the author´s website ? no copyright problems right?). I have tried to organize them starting from the easiest, GOOD LUCK!

1.Comment Spam Quick Fix from Burningbird’s. Easy method to start stoping spam in your blog. You add a hidden field to all of your comment forms and then MT look for that information when it processes the comment form. This simple process will eliminate most of bots spam comments (the most dangerous).

You only need to modify the following MT templates:
Individual data entry
Comment Listing Template
Comment Preview Template
Comment Error Page

2.Comment Queue Script/MT Hack from ScriptyGoddess. This script put all comments into a pending status until you approve or disapprove them. This solution may cause your blog a lost of interaction but you can target comments suspicious of spam. Some people will find this difficult because you must modify your MT installation and also you must watch your comments. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may know there is a lot of discussion going on out there regarding blog comment spam. In my opinion comment spam can be defined as a comment posted to a blog wich is not related with the content of your post. It will include a link in the comments field or in the name of the author to a commercial website. The problem is becoming serious as spammers are developing bots that can make dozens of post in an hour. We must stop this now or we´ll be the third spam generation victims after mail boxes and guestbooks.

Blog comment spam can´t be comprared yet with his big brother “email” but there is enough presence to be considered as a danger. MT doesn´t help too much cleaning your articles from spamming post so if you don´t want to spend an hour each day doing blog cleaning I recommend you to take action right now. They use bots to kill your blog but you don´t have a cleaning bot, remewmber this!. We must hit asap before this becomes a major problem. Some blacklists are ready to use and other methods are a good starting point. I have collected here some methods and solutions that blog owner are developing. I´ll add a brief description of each method and a link to the author´s website where you ca find more info. I don´t want to infright copyrighted material so you must get the original content from the authore´s website. Read the rest of this entry »