Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Stupid Spammer Tricks

As spam prevention has become more sophisticated, spammers have changed tactics to match. Among other tools, comment systems use filters that can separate legitimate comments from spam. One tactic against filtering seems to be copying the text of a previous comment and posting it along with a spam url.

Commenter "Dicky" did just this on my previous feeder bird post. "Dicky" copied two paragraphs from BG's comment, made a nonsensical statement, and then added the address of a spam site into the body of the comment and the url box. "Dicky's" IP address tracks to Indonesia; my guess is that this is an infected PC that was hacked remotely and turned into a spambot.

It seems that CAPTCHA and word verification are not completely safe either.