Cursed comment spam

"I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. i thought i would leave my first comment. i don't know what to say except that i have enjoyed reading. nice blog. i will keep visiting this blog very often."

Sounds very genuine doesn't it. "My first comment". Makes you feel very - touched. How nice.

A search for this phrase on Google returns 249, 000 matches.

This. Exact. Phrase.

So despite the fact that it got past the Google comment anti-spammer check, it is not a real comment.

I don't know if this is a script, bot, virus or just a plain army of low paid turks. Whatever, it is very annoying.

I went looking at some of the 249,000 victim websites.

Many that I looked at had this exact "post" inline with many other actual real posts.

In some cases the website owners/original posters had responded back thanking "Elaina" or whoever for their thoughtful comment.

The author of the original article and the other commenters likely have no idea in all of those 249,000 cases.

The weird thing is that for a fairly sophisticated exploit, the website the URL's are pointing to are very plain - they seem to follow this pattern:

• a basic looking wordpress site with 2-3 posts
• no real obvious google-traps, or large collections of advertisements
• commercial sort of angle, real-estate and so on - but no immediate money spinner
• site purportedly run by a single person, with a personal profile
• some javascript links all looking to have something to do with Wordpresses K2 sidebar
  

My current theory for what is going on is that the captcha's are being beaten by a "Turk" type setup.

It could work like this. I want to promote my dodgy website, and pay a service called "Evil Promotions" that promises to raise it up in Google rankings.

The service recruits a small army of low paid workers - or perhaps they are paid in kind with gambling credits or pornography. The workers log into a web interface on "Evil Promotions" website and click a button.

Behind the scenes Evil Promotions run a set of scripts that go around millions of websites, looking for ones that have a comment facility.

Then the automated script finds such "Victim" websites, in their hundreds-of-thousands and it "clicks" on the buttons and makes a post. The script drops the very human sounding text above into the comment field.

The "Victim Site" sends back a captcha - an image with some distorted text, which only a human could read - the script passes the captcha on to the workers via Evil Promotions website. The worker types the response to the captch and clicks a button.

The Evil Promotions script sends the captcha response back to the victim website, which faithfully logs it as a human comment.

The worker just types responses, and clicks, over and over again, never seeing the websites that the responses are going to. I don't know what they could get out of such mindless repetitive work, but I hope for their sakes its worth it.

To me, if I'm half right, the whole thing stinks.

A low act.

Now - I have had an idea - maybe I can fight back. I just left comments on two of the websites I found, explaining what I just found. I asked the authors to do two things:

• delete the comment
• contact two other sites that had been spammed and suggest they do the same

Lets see what happens.

Movin' on up to Blogger

This post just made to my original website, announces the planned move here - to Blogger.

Tell ye a story bout a girl named Sez,
poor ole' blogger,
barely kept her site upkept,

Then one day she was shootin' for some news,
when up thru the 'Net came a bloggin' cruise!

Google, that is.

Net gold - Silicon Valley tea.

Well the first thing you know ole Sez' a bloggin dude,
using cool web UI's with no trouble at all.

They said Californ-i-a's the place you oughta go
and there usin' Blogger's the only way to go.

(With apologies to the Beverly Hillbillies).

So the endless rounds of updating wordpress, fighting off spammers and crackers has finally gotten too much, so I am over the next wee while going to move off my current custom linux box setup, and onto the suite of Google Apps products.

Right now you can access the previous post New New Economy hosted in my new digs on Blogger at http://blog.storybridge.org.

This was pretty simple to achieve by using Bloggers custom domain name feature, and modifying my storybridge DNS so that the CNAME points to bloggers hosts.

Blogger has a lot of other nice features, like just clicking a checkbox to get a captcha that will deter spammers, without having to fiddle with plugins that break on upgrades - which is the Wordpress story.

The big concern is losing many many years of blogging and authoring history.

And losing you - whoever you are. The handful of stalwarts that keep reading.

Please stick with me - keep coming back.

Kick yer shoes off and sit a spell. :-)

If my plans work out the same URL's will keep working. You won't even have to change your bookmarks.

My plan is to write a redirector in Google App Engine and have the main storybridge.org site point to that, and use it to redirect incoming connects to path's like http://storybridge.org/wordpress - and to the wiki pages I have created over the years.

And, you know something - I must say the Kool-aid is tasting pretty damn good right now.