fooled by spam

march has really not been my month. first i find out that not only have i finally had my very first malware incident but that it had also been present for nearly a year, and then i get fooled into approving a comment that is in actuality spam.

cdman83 has a writeup on the spam campaign, and gunter ollmann got the final word from sophos that it really was someone loosely associated with them (an employee of a company they hired) who was responsible and who they intend to take to task over the fiasco.

perhaps i'm losing my touch in my old age and becoming too trusting, too willing to give the benefit of the doubt. then again, if i'd had the multiple comments that gunter ollmann had i would have had a far less ambiguous dataset from which to draw conclusions from. i guess i shouldn't feel too bad about being fooled, after all i was only fooled into approving a relatively benign comment - sophos was fooled into hiring the company in question in the first place and giving them money.

how not to comment spam

i recently received some comment spam for this blog... that's not altogether unusual, and certainly not noteworthy in itself, but this comment was something else... i think i'll need to show you what i saw:

now i've seen a number of things over the years that have triggered my internal spam detecter (including people trying to put html tags in the name field - a great way to get your comment rejected, just so you know) but never has anyone put in so much individual effort into blowing smoke up my ass...

add to that the name this person entered: seo is a common abbreviation for search engine optimization which is something that comment spammers try to accomplish...

and of course, the most obvious sign of them all, the link that has nothing to do with the article the commenter was commenting on nor the comment itself... links that aren't a natural part of the conversation shouldn't go in the comment... if you want to raise awareness for a site, stick the url in the website field of the comment form...

in fact, if you really want to successfully raise awareness for something, take a look at rob lewis' comments... it became clear to me rather quickly that rob trying to drum up interest in a product but i accepted his comments anyways... why? because he asked questions, he asked for opinions, he engaged in conversation and posted links in a manner that fit with the conversation... in short he was an evangelist rather than a mindless comment spammer...

oh well, just more grist for the lolthreats mill i suppose...

what is comment spam?

comment spam is spam that appears in blog comments instead of in email...

traditionally the idea behind comment spam was to add links a spamvertised (advertised by spam) site to various other sites so that a) people would follow those links and visit the spamvertised site and b) search engines like google would rank the spamvertised site higher since there were more links to it and so it would be more likely to show up on the first page of search results (basically a kind of search engine optimization scheme)...

different blogs have different means of coping with comment spam: some have a CAPTCHA, some require a moderator to approve the comment before it can appear on the blog, some use moderation after the fact (so that for a while the spam will actually appear there), some require the commenter to create an account, and some even have advanced content or IP-based filtering... not all blog owners implement anti-spam functionality for their comments, however, and no anti-spam technique is perfect so in some cases the spam still gets through...

to combat the SEO effect some (possibly most) blog platforms implemented a technique by which links in comments would be marked in such a way that search engines wouldn't count them regardless of whether they were good links or bad links...

that didn't stop comment spam either, of course - people can still follow the links and not all comment spam even has links anymore... as such blog owners still often need to use techniques like those described above to combat comment spam...

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