Paul Judge

1) Stupid: (all of they are but…) they post dozens of links in the same comment (even images), in addition they can post the same comment many times. They copy & paste the same html code.

2) Moderate: they post very simple comments like “nice blog” or “very interesting article”. They use the keyword (viagra,phentermine) as the name, this way they get high google rankings with the text links. They fail in the keyword as the name, do you know someone with viagra as his real name?. Also the url is another key to catch them!

3) Amateur: very similar as moderate but this time they use a real name as the anchor text (Allan, Steven..) so is more difficult to identify the comment as spam. The key: just check the url of the comment, it will be something like cheap-prescriptions.com.

4) Professional: they read your article, then post a comment related (few lines),use real names and the urls of their websites are not comercial domains. This way they get a domain with high Google PageRank and then add links to their commercial websites. Be careful with this type of spammers.

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.

If enough people used filters with the feature, the resulting amount of traffic to the spammers’ links could dramatically raise the spammers’ bandwidth costs or even shut down their websites.

“Technically, it’s beautifully balanced,” said Graham, whose 2002 proposal on using Bayesian algorithms to fight spam led to the rise of the current generation of filters. “It’s a way to raise spammers’ bandwidth costs in exact proportion to the amount of spam that they send out.”

Graham’s latest proposal is not without its critics, however, who say that a sudden burst of requests coming from thousands or maybe even millions of spam filters around the world could drain Internet resources.

Graham readily dismisses the argument. “That’s identical to saying that you shouldn’t have police chase down criminals because it uses up resources,” he said. “Yeah, there’s an increase in bandwidth initially, but the net effect is worth it.”

He adds that developers of antispam products should allow users to limit the number of times that their filters try to access a particular link during an attack, or even to disable the feature completely if they choose.

But even when presented with this solution, opponents say Graham’s plan has other problems that render it unsuitable ? the most important of which is its potential to harm legitimate companies.

According to Francois Lavaste, vice president of marketing for Brightmail, an antispam software firm, some spammers set up their Web pages on free Web-hosting services. “Launching any type of DoS attack on those pages could actually damage the entire service,” said Lavaste.

Additionally, spammers and pranksters could abuse the system by sending out junk mail containing links to innocent websites that they simply don’t like. If enough filters flagged the mail as spam, they could inadvertently launch an attack against those sites.

As a precaution against such abuses, Graham notes in his proposal that filter developers should require their products to check all links against a blacklist of domain names belonging to known spammers before launching an attack. But some developers have been burned by blacklists in the past and note that the lists themselves can be abused.

“At Matterform, we’ve been victimized more than once by falsified spams that supposedly advertise our URL in an attempt to annoy us,”said Matterform Media President Michael Herrick, whose company develops the Spamfire filter.

“The antispam vigilantes caused us all kinds of problems by blacklisting us without any human investigation,” added Herrick. “The vigilantes told us we should be angry with the spammers, not them. Somehow, it didn’t work that way.”

Herrick says he’s not completely against Graham’s idea, though. Indeed, Matterform’s Spamfire already features a “Bug the WegBugs” option designed to confuse spammers.

Whenever a Spamfire user selects the option, the program searches through messages for “Web bugs” ? images used for tracking purposes ? and then repeatedly sends back false tracking data to the spammer’s server.

The tactic is not going to shut down the spamming industry overnight, admits Herrick. However, he does believe that antispammers can make a significant dent.
“It’s a cat-and-mouse game with spammers,” he said. “They mutate, we adapt. We fight back, they parry. But (this tactic) can be another hoop the spammers have to jump through. The more hoops, the more likely they are to fall down.”

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.

In late September, the trickle of comment spam swelled to a torrent. Flash programmer Michael Gunn’s blog received 150 messages from “preteen” and “lolita.” Web designer and developer D. Keith Robinson started
getting 40 spams at a time.

Across the Web, spambots were churning through bloggers’ comment threads, leaving behind dozens of links embedded in key phrases like “buy viagra” or “diet pills.” Others, more deviously, posted innocuous blurbs
like, “Nice site you have here!” and embedded the spammer’s URL in the comment signature, under fake names like “underage,” “cheap shoes” or “phentermine.”

Bloggers agreed that, unlike garden-variety e-mail spam, the comment spam they were receiving was not designed to attract click-throughs. Its primary audience wasn’t human; it was the all-seeing search-engine robot.

By embedding URLs in hundreds of blog comments, spammers apparently think they can trick search engines ? particularly Google ? into believing that the blog community is abuzz with news of the latest cheap Viagra
website. Since Google treats links as a measure of popularity, the thinking goes, a network of blog links pointing at the spammer’s site will give it preferential placement in search-engine rankings.

While Movable Type blogs make up a small fraction of the millions of blogs on the Web, that fraction includes some of the most popular and influential sites, including those of ?berblogger Glenn Reynolds (who does not enable comments), actor Wil Wheaton and the Howard Dean presidential campaign.

“If you were trying to select for a group of people that have high page rank and have high traffic, Movable Type is a good place to start,said Cameron Marlow, creator of the blog aggregator Blogdex.

Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, however, said comment spammers may be overestimating
the influence blogs have over search-engine results.

“There have been some misconceptions that blogs have almost superhuman power over search engines, which is not the case,” he said. “Some people may have bought into that hype and believed that all they needed to improve their ranking was to get a bunch of links from blogs.”

Sullivan added that whatever effect comment spam had on search-engine results would be unlikely to last long. “All spamming types of things are failing strategies,” he said. “They may work for a very short period
of time, but search engines come back, and it’s another step in the constant arms race between search engines and the people who optimize for them.”

For now, however, comment spam remains a serious nuisance. In some ways it is even more insidious than its e-mail counterpart. Where e-mail spam is at least easy to spot and delete, comment spam can pile up unnoticed in hundreds of separate comment threads.

And once a blogger spots an infestation, getting rid of the unwanted comments can be a tedious chore.

Six Apart co-founders Ben and Mena Trott said they planned to improve comment handling in upcoming releases of Movable Type and their hosted blogging service, TypePad. Among the features under consideration are bulk deletion of comments generated by a particular IP address, and the ability to
delete comments directly from notification e-mails sent every time a user posts.

The Trotts cautioned, however, that there would be no quick fix. “Like e-mail, there isn’t one simple solution that can be switched on and end spam completely,” they wrote on Six Apart’s official blog.

Not that there was any risk bloggers would adopt one simple solution. Only weeks after bloggers raised the cry for help, Movable Type users had devised numerous hacks, workarounds and full-fledged add-ons to combat the problem. Unsurprisingly, each generated its share of debate.

Many bloggers reported success at stopping the flow of spam,
but everyone seemed to agree that what they had experienced so far was just a
taste of what was coming.

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.

Wade ? You’re kidding! How do they get all of those email addresses?

SK ? Ahhh, I’ll fill you in on a few secrets about email addresses. It is very easy to get lists of email addresses either by purchasing them or “harvesting” them. I tend to use both methods.

Wade ? What is harvesting?

SK ? Harvesting involves running specialized programs that go out and collect email addresses. Some scan newsgroups and pull out addresses others can be setup to work by city or zip code.
It doesn’t take long running these programs to pull thousands of email addresses. With the suite of programs I use I can get about 100,000 an hour. The easiest way to get email lists is to buy them. Most good harvesting programs are expensive and for the part time spammer, lists are more cost effective.

Wade ? Don’t ISP’s shut down spammers now?

SK ? Your good ones do. But there are ways around that. Either switch ISP’s every time you get busted or invest in one of the spamming programs. The program I use opens 12 channels at a time to send out emails. The ISP can’t really tell what’s happening other than heavy traffic. ISP’s catch spammers when they get complaints from their customers. The software I use even stops that from happening. It scrambles the headers in the packets so you can’t backtrack the email to the sender. You can’t complain if you don’t know where it’s coming from.

Wade ? OK, you’ve got all these email addresses and the program to send them out. How much money can you make?

SK – Now that’s the million-dollar question. A lot depends on the product you’re selling and your imagination. You’ve got to come up with a Subject line that catch’s the attention of the reader. Most of the spam I’ve seen out there is very unimaginative and you can tell its spam right away. A good subject line will get your email opened and that’s what counts.
Also, use a sender ID that is interesting. spamboy@hotmail.com will automatically get deleted whereas smith@billsmith.com will tend to get opened, as it looks legit. Another trick is to change the date on your system 10 days forward. This way, your email always stays on top in the email box until the reader manually deletes it. AS far as making money goes, you have to send out a lot of email to make any money. The response percentage is around .001 percent so you can see that it’s a big numbers game.

Wade ? Do you have any suggestions for our readers on how to stop spam from getting into their email boxes?

SK ? You will never be able to stop all the spam but a good spam filter will help. You have to work a bit to set them up but it’s worth it if you want to stop spam. Get one that works off of keywords in the message as subject line related ones are easy to get around. Don’t use your regular email address to fill out anything on the Internet. Setup an account at one of the free services for use when filling out forms online. You would be amazed at the number of websites that sell email addresses from users filling out online forms. The number one thing I’ll pass on is don’t respond to any offers sent via email. AS soon as you respond you make it legal for them to email you again and you’ve just verified that the email address is a good one.

Wade ? Any final words you would like to pass on?

SK ? Sure. Keep on putting your email address out there for me.
I’m always looking for a new email address to add to my spam list!

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.

Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will not be tolerated.

Bloggers will track you down and notify your hosting providers about your activities. We will tell your ISPs what you are using their connections for. We will let the makers of the products you are advertising know of your despicable sales methods. We will hit you where it hurts by attacking your source of income.

You can move to a new host, find a new ISP, or sign up for a different affiliate plan. The end result will be the same. Each time you rise out of the muck we will strike you down and send you back to the hole you crawled out of.

Our sites belong to us and we intend to keep it that way. It will no longer be profitable to advertise through comment spam.
What you can do

Sign the manifesto by linking to it, leaving a comment or sending a TrackBack ping. Get the word out and let spammers know that their days are numbered.

Write tutorials on how to track down spammers and shut down their operations. I wrote about how to get spammer’s affiliate accounts terminated. Perhaps someone else could write up how to trace a domain back to their hosting company. Or how to use tools like dig to find someone’s ISP based on their IP address.

Start a posse. People particularly good at tracking down spammers could volunteer to help others. If a blogger is spammed, the volunteers could track down the culprit and shut him down. Stopping comment spam in one corner of the web will be good for everyone.

E-mail

The largest flow of spam is distributed via electronic mail (e-mail). Currently, the proportion of viruses and spam in general traffic, e-mail is on an estimated 70 to 95 percent . As spam is most frequent advertising unpopular products: rolex, viagra, etc. .

Spammers collect e-mail addresses by using a special robot, or manually (rarely), using a web page, conference Usenet, mailing lists, electronic bulletin boards, guest books, chat rooms … This robot software is able to collect thousands of addresses per hour and create one database for further distribution by them as spam. Some companies only deal with the collection of addresses, a database and then sell. Some companies sell spammers e-mail addresses of their customers, they have ordered goods or services via e-mail. There is another way to get a long list of e-mail addresses: the addresses are generated by first randomly on specified patterns (from thousands to a million), and then just checked the special program-validator on their validity (existence).

To send spam is used connected to the Internet not protected or properly configured computers. These may include:
Servers that are in error are such that allow free mail forwarding (open relay, open proxy).
Webmail services that allow anonymous access, or access to a simple registration of new users (who can perform special robot software).
Computer-zombies. Some spammers are using known vulnerabilities in software or computer viruses in order to capture the management of a large number of computers connected to the Internet, and use them to send spam.
Mail servers that send Bounce-message when it is not possible to deliver a letter. Spammers send a letter to the obviously non-existent address, indicating a forged sender address (the one on which you want to get spam). The server creates an email with the error message and sends it to the specified address, often placing it and the text of the original letter. It should be noted that such behavior is the server with the standards adopted by the Internet, in fact, in some cases, it is the only way to notify the sender of the problem (for example, when sending messages through several consecutive servers), however, the guide for system administrators often makes recommendations to configure mail server in such a way that when you try to deliver a letter to an unused address of the server instead of creating an error message would have tore the compound. Use different kinds of vulnerabilities and not obvious wrong (or conservative) setting mail servers for unauthorized distribution SPAM.

For the difficulty of automatic filtering of spam messages are often distorted ? the letters are used instead of similar style numbers, letters ? instead of the Russians, in random places added gaps. We use other techniques.

There are various tricks to make sure that the message received and read. Among them:
Request for confirmation of delivery. Some mail clients can send it automatically.
Letters that contain images that are downloaded from sites controlled by spammers.
Links to web pages that are invited to learn more.
Proposal to unsubscribe to this mailing list by sending a letter to the specified address (in fact, delivery is usually not terminated).

If spammers get confirmation that the email address actually being used, then the flow of spam could be increased many times over.

Usenet

Many newsgroups Usenet, especially nemoderiruemye were abandoned by users, and now contains almost exclusively advertising, often not even on topic. Instead, others were created moderated conference.

Instant Messaging

With the development of the delivery of instant messages, spammers have been using them for their purposes. Many of these services provide a list of users that can be used to send spam.

A narrower called this type of spam ? sleep (SP am + I nstant M essenger). Blogs, wikis, forums,

message boards

In recent years become popular Web sites where you can leave comments (such as forums and blogs), or those that can be freely edited ? wiki. As these pages open for the free editing, they can be posted Spam ? splogi. Such spam is all the more irritating that its difficult to remove (as a rule, messages in the forums and blogs can edit only the privileged users ? consequently, a private party should communicate with anyone of them).

Another kind of spam in blogs is a universal, often ? automatic, introducing users to the list of ?friends?, without getting acquainted with their personal pages, as a rule, in order to artificially raise their rank by obtaining ?Mutual? friendship, or to draw attention to the online advertisements placed log spammer. This type of spam is sometimes referred to as ?Frendospamom? (from the English. Friend ? a friend).

Sometimes spam distribution network via the built-in Microsoft Windows SMB-service Messenger. These messages appear as pop-ups (unless a third-party software, manufacturing them in other ways). In this case, to turn off their admission may be, for example, to stop the Messenger service using net stop messenger [12]. In versions of Windows NT, beginning with Windows XP SP2, this service has already stopped by default, so this method of distribution are less likely to occur.

SMS-messages

Spam can be spread not only through the Internet. Advertising messages sent to mobile phones via SMS-messages, especially the unpleasant fact that they are difficult to defend.

Collect email addresses

Spammers find out the email addresses of users in different ways. Some of them are:
Address mailbox user posted on the public site ? mostly in the guest book, forum, personal card, etc., where it can find a special program (harvester), Scanning indexing sites such as search engine robots.
If the address of the mailbox is not unique word, for example, common name, it may be chosen for the dictionary. Do spammers have special dictionaries that include common words, names of people, place names and some of the most popular combination of network slang. Combining this dictionary and a list of domain names (open public), a spammer gets a list of addresses for mailing.
If you are a person with whom the owner of this correspondence box was infected with a Trojan program, all the addresses from its address book can get to a spammer.
The database of customers a company could be stolen or even sold by the company spammers.

Harmful

Mass mailing of spam is low cost to the sender for a message. However, a huge number of useless messages cause obvious harm to the recipients. The first refers to the time spent wasted on unnecessary screening mail and vyiskivanii among its individual letters to the right. Very often the Internet traffic is very expensive, and you have to pay for apparently unnecessary emails. It is believed that the spam could be beneficial for providers, as well as lead to increased traffic. In fact, providers also have additional costs due to increasing the useless burden on the channels and equipment. It is the providers have to spend resources on redundant hardware and the system of protection against spam. According to publicly available statistics , at least 80% of chain letters is currently spam (according to some research on a web user now account for 70 spamovyh messages per day ). Most of its mail servers shall be shut off during the reception. But even the remaining small part is sufficient to aggravate the lives of users. Providers bear additional costs because of the constant need to fight spammers (excess equipment, excess capacity channels, a special software for spam).

Spam is also harms the reputation of adherents of this method of marketing. A simulation of the spam mailing can be used to discredit the good (which it is advertised) and / or carrier, with which it addresses (supposedly or really) done, that is, spam can be used in unfair competition and ?black? PR

It is clear that spam brings economic benefits to its customers. This means that users, despite the dislike of spam, does enjoy the services advertised through spam. Until the impact of spam exceeds the cost of overcoming protection, spam will not disappear. Thus, the surest way to fight a denial of service advertised through spam. There are proposals on the use of public condemnation, until the end of communication, against those who buy spam advertised goods and services.

Other methods are aimed at inhibiting the spammers access to users.

Preventive measures to protect

The surest way to fight spam ? do not let spammers get e-mail address. This is a difficult task, but some precautions can be taken.
Do not publish your email address on public websites.
If for some reason the email account to publish, it can be coded like ?u_s_e_r_ (a) _d_o_m_a_i_n_._n_e_t?. Spammers use special programs to scan websites and collect email addresses, so even a masking addresses can help. It should be remembered, however, that in the simplest cases ?encoded? will be able to recognize and address of the program. In addition, it is an inconvenience not only for spammers, but also for ordinary users.

Many services to provide addresses for non-registered users can send a message to the nick. The real address is substituted service of a user profile and not visible to other users.
Address can be represented in the form of pictures. There are online services that make it automatically , you can also do it in a graphics editor , or simply write the email address of your hands and take pictures.
On the web-pages, e-mail addresses can be protected with the help of Java Script, which is not recognized by the software to collect e-mail addresses.

There is no need to without full guarantees of non-register at the web sites. You can make a special box for these cases and do not use it for regular work. There are even services, issuing disposable addresses specifically to identify them in case of doubt. The most famous of them ? mailinator.com.
Never respond to spam or pass on the reference therein. Such action will confirm that the e-mail address is actively used and would increase the amount of spam.

By downloading the images included in the letter, when read, can be used to test the activity of postal address. It is therefore recommended that they request a mail client for permission to prohibit the effect of loading the image, if you are unsure of the sender.
When choosing an e-mail address should, if possible, stay in a long and uncomfortable for guessing the name. Thus, there is less than 12 million names, consisting of no more than 5 Latin letters. Even if you add numbers and symbols underlined, the number of nicknames, less than 70 million. The spammers can send mails to all such names and weed out those with whom he came to answer ?recipient does not exist?. Thus, it is desirable that the name was not shorter than 6 characters, and if there are no numbers ? not shorter than 7 characters. It is also desirable that the name was not a word in any language, including common names, as well as recorded in Latin Russian words. In this case the address can be guessed by the crowding of words and combinations of the dictionary.

You may from time to time change its address, but this is due to the obvious difficulty: you need to communicate the new address to people who would like to receive e-mails.
Companies often do not publish your address, instead of using CGI to communicate with users.

All methods of hiding the address is a fundamental flaw: they create an inconvenience, not only the alleged spammers, but the real addressees. Besides, often just need to publish the address ? for example, if a contact address.