Spam: February 2006 Archives

I was reviewing my trackback spam. Yes, I review what the system calls spam just to make sure no legitimate content gets sidetracked. Some of the spam had links to a Radford Professor's website. If you followed the link to the University site, and you have javascript enabled, you'll find yourself immediagely redirected to a porn site (not located on the Radford server).

If the spammer had half a brain, he would have social engineered people much better than that. First make it look like a real post. A comment or trackback with tons of links is not going to get through. Second, instead of obvious spam content, the trackback could be a bit more relevent to what is posted. Since the spammer is 0wning a legit domain like Radford.edu use that value. People will trust it more than a link to sexsexsex.more

Yahoo and AOL have announced plans for a preferred spammer program, where by a sender can pay fractions of a cent per email and bypass all filters. Its not clear whether this program will actually whitelist unsolicited commercial email or if it will only whitelist valid email from participating companies.

This new plan would appear to be an abandonment of Yahoo Domain Keys and Microsoft Sender ID.