All bloggers detest spam and splogs. Spammers attempt to co-op your website into advertising for them while stealing your bandwidth, and splogs cut right to the chase by stealing your words and reposting them with their own ads. We’ve got plugins like Akismet, Spam-Karma that stop comment spam while other plugins like AntiLeech and Digital Fingerprint help you fight the rebologging splogs.

All these plugins are great at helping to defend your website from the nefarious types, but the greatest tools in the fight against splogs and spam are elbow grease and a discerning mind.

One thing I know most webmasters (including myself) don’t do enough of is sift through our weblogs. Website logs collected at the server level can tell us a myriad of things but most importantly, they can help us pinpoint who is stealing our bandwidth (via out of control robots and comment spammers) and who is stealing our content. A tiny bit of hard work, the ability to follow directions, some familiarity with excel, and a keen eye for the out of place is all you need to figure out who is stealing from you by looking at your logs. Let me show you. » Read the rest of the entry..

Typhoid Mary (aka Mary Mallon) was was the first identified healthy carrier of typhoid in the US. While she did not die from typhoid, she passed the disease to others who then became infected and died. Throughout most of her life, she denied her role in the deaths of those infected by her. Today the term ‘Typhoid Mary’ has come to mean a carrier of a dangerous disease who is a danger to the public because they refuse to take appropriate precautions.

Kanga.nu is a typhoid mary. This Plone site has a major security vulnerability which allows malicious users to create URL’s on the site that then forward visitors to a new page. Here is how it works:

» Read the rest of the entry..

Observe the best of today’s splog spam my filters caught. Somewhere between step 1 and step 1 + n, this guy screwed up. I’m thinking it was on step 2, but it could have been steps 3 or 4. Care to guess?

Nice blog. If you are interested in other ##KEYWORD## related blogs visit ##LINK##
Interesting Post. If you find ##KEYWORD## interesting, I invite you to check out my ##LINK## website.

I really liked your post. You would probably enjoy the articles I have compiled at my ##LINK## site. I invite you to check it out.
As always, you have compiled a very interesting blog here. I think you would enjoy my ##LINK## blog. You should check it out if you are interested in all things related to ##KEYWORD##

Very well written! Based on the content of your blog, I think you might enjoy some of the articles at my ##LINK## site and hope you will give it a peek.

Here is my reply: » Read the rest of the entry..

I’ve written about methods of alerting contextual advertising networks to abuse before [see Abusing Yahoo!’s Contextual Advertising (YPN) — not clickfraud] and have been pleased to see some action on the front. But things are still too complicated and time consuming. Spammers continue to prosper at the expense of us all (see why everyone loses).

The following guide explains two ways of fighting back and alerting the Adsense program of abuse that you stumble across when browsing the web (skip the preamble and head right to the two methods). A typical scenario involves the following: » Read the rest of the entry..

An update to some newsworthy items dealing with the issues covered recently on maxpower: plagiarism, poets, and spam. The spammers are now stealing your web identification (at least in regards to the blogging world), myspace plagiarism situational irony, and the poets attack again.
» Read the rest of the entry..

This article continues down the same path as Teaching Akismet Part 1: I am good with a look at how Akismet could be used for nefarious purposes. In the first post we learned that user input determines what Akismet thinks is spam. In this article, that idea is expanded in order to teach akismet to be bad. Below are listed three potential applications of the idea that Akismet can be taught things.
» Read the rest of the entry..

Introduction: Part 1 of a 2 part series focused on how Akismet can / could be taught good or evil. Part 1 below explains the situation I found myself in, and the steps that I took to remove myself from Akismet’s list of comment spammers. Part 2 introduces some theoretical concepts for the creation of spamming networks.

For the past couple of days, Akismet (a popular comment spam fighting service provided by Automattic et al) had me pegged as a comment spammer. I didn’t know that Akismet was doing this, I only figured it out after several random blogs refused to post comments I had made.
» Read the rest of the entry..