Spammers Resort To Comment Silliness
Posted by Dan Morrill
Most of us at least look at our spam queues on our systems on a semi-regular basis, what is always interesting is to see the variances in tactics that spammers are using to try to get their stuff into your system. This time it is all about jokes, ones my kids would like.
There is nothing wrong with a good joke – and spammers seem to have caught onto the idea that burying their ads under jokes might just work – odds are also highly likely that it does.
As a tactic this would work for some people who do not pay good attention to spammers and what they are doing or how they vary their techniques to get their links back to their pages filled with drug pushing goodness. I would also bet that many web site owners would pass on these thinking that their spam filter might have caught legitimate traffic. After taking a quick look through Google and filtering for obvious joke sites, there are about 30,000 sites that approved the Viagra to ground beef joke, meaning this tactic worked. What was interesting to see was there was not a tracking code within the spam message this time to make it easier to search Google for a random series of numbers and letters.
Not bad, interesting change to tactics on the part of spammers and very social in its nature, we all love a good joke. In addition, something to watch for as you approve or not approve messages on your web site or forum.
About the Author: Dan Morrill runs Techwag, a site all about his views on social media, education, technology, and some of the more interesting things that happen on the internet. He works at CityU of Seattle as the Program Director for the Computer Science, Information Systems and Information Security educational programs.