Spams for other people’s blogs
A bizarre new spam trend has emerged over the last few days – spamming people’s blogs with links to other people’s blogs. I’ve had a large number of trackback pings over the past few days containing links to five blogs, three located in Japan (Skys.jp and Allucher.com – in Japanese – and Cosmic Buddha), one in Germany (Tim Pritlove) and one in Seattle (The Useful Arts).
None of the blogs appear to be malevolent “spam blogs”; all use Movable Type, and Cosmic Buddha has denied any involvement in the attack, which linked one of his old entries from way back in March this year, about the fun he had in the slums of Osaka. None of the trackbacks actually appeared on my blog; they were caught by the filter because they had more than two URLs in the text. I’ve decided to put all three sites on my blacklist, which means any trackbacks or comments mentioning “ianniciello”, “cosmicbuddha” or “skys.jp” will automatically be refused, which I intend will remain in place for a week.
Why would anyone do this? “Because he’s an idiot” is one obvious answer. Two of the bloggers targeted (one also in Japan) suggested that this was an attack on auto-blacklist software, intended to fill them with innocent sites so that they are less useful against conventional trackback and comment spam. One consequence of this is that the people whose sites get this unwanted publicity need to not only delete the spam, but also make it clear to the blacklist authors that their sites are blogs and they do not spam. If there are any blacklists which are somehow automatic in the way they gather addresses, they need to be re-written, or suspended, pretty sharpish.
The spams targeted both MT blogs and WordPress blogs, although all the “advertised” blogs are MT blogs. The URLs are mostly old-style traditional MT archive links (Skys.jp excepted), which should make it easy for blacklisters to exclude these links when they build their lists … unless, of course, spammers go to the trouble of building MT blogs containing nothing but spam links. With Blogger clamping down on the misuse of its facilities for this purpose, it’s only a matter of time before they turn to other methods.
