Argh, Maties! Bloody Spammers Be Improvin'!

Spam spam spam!
How I loathe spam.
All day all night,
try as I might,
I just can't stop the damn spam!

So have you seen the new comment spam technique? The spammer signs the comment w/an average sounding name (rather than the usual random numbers and digits gibberish) and uses a legitimate blog URL for the “return” url field. The links in the body of the comment are also legit—they go to what appear to be legitimate and innocent blogs. And that's it. But the text of the comment doesn't make logical sense. It starts w/the usual stuff like “I really like your site” or whatever, but then it will just have a couple of these links and some nonsense text. Fine. It looks like spam, but fairly harmless spam. So why would this be worth a spammer's time if it doesn't even point to any spam-like URLs?

The spam URLs are hidden! I don't know how they do it, but the comment itself does not show that there are additional spam links buried in it somehow. However, when you run it through Blacklist, the spam URLs show up to be blacklisted. How do they do that?

I need to upgrade this MT install to MT 3.2! For those who have upgraded, are you finding your spam woes have decreased?

Posted 08:48 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack | meta-blogging