How Woopra Catches Drive-by Comment Spammers

Today someone left the following comment:

Now, it caught my eye for two reasons:

  1. They left a URL in the comment. I’m constantly on the lookout for that because I don’t want YOU guys (my real readers) to be subjected to spammy comments.
  2. They claim to be a long time reader who visits constantly.

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Road & Track Magazine Pushes Penis Enlargement Pills

Does anyone else Read Road & Track magazine? Are you as sick as me of turning through the pages at the back of the magazine and finding the Penis Enlargement ads?

What the hell is up these guys? Are they THAT broke? I mean, as I read through the magazine and see Ferraris, Bugattis, and other $100,000+ vehicles it makes me wonder why I’d see these spammy fake pill ads in the exact same magazine.


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Comment Spammers Get Sneaky, But You Should Delete Them Ruthlessly!

You guys have heard me drone on and on about my hatred of Spammers. I really mean it when I say I want to shoot them. Like with a real gun. In Texas. (Yee-haw)

Anyway, some people seem to think that they are not spammers as long as they leave a nice sounding comment along with their spammy “made-for-adwords” website link. And I guess they even think it’s ok for them to use different names on different comments… and different spammy MFA website links.

Another Spammy Example

In fact, here is an example of someone who used 4 different domains and two different names when leaving comments. Of course, they didn’t take into account the fact that they have the same damn IP address on every comment (all of which have now been deleted).

Oh, by the way, normally I would feel bad about putting someone’s name or email address up in an image, but since I don’t believe the names are real anyway, I have no sympathy.


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Protect WordPress from Hackers – Secure that Beeotch!

Atom BombDammit!!!! I HATE SPAMMERS MORE THAN ANYONE ON EARTH! I honestly, 100% mean it when I say that I want to KILL spammers. You guys are laughing right now… “hehehe. Here goes that crazy John P. with another rant about spammers. Aww, he’s just kidding!” No! I am an ex-Marine, I own guns and knives, and I’m begging a spammer to show up at my house so I can do horrible things to him!!!! GRRRRR!!!!!

Today I got an email from Google as follows:

Dear site owner or webmaster of onemansblog.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

The following is some example hidden text we found at http://onemansblog.com/:

calendar acrobat download wcc adobe’s click. create watermark in adobe acrobat ea adobe acrobat professional Software Planetadobe creative suite 2 rumors adobe acrobat not finding scanner . adobe acrobat 8.01 professional software adobe acrobat 5.0. activate adobe acrobat 8 adobe acrobat contact sheet Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended | Software Planetadobe acrobat 6 professional serial numbers c adobe acrobat fields sql . download adobe acrobat reader full version could not find adobe acrobat plugin

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from onemansblog.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

Why, pray tell, would Google ban OneMansBlog from the index? Well, because some sneaky bastard somehow added a bunch of spam to the footer of my blog! HOW? My directory permissions are correct, I have all the latest versions of plugins installed and WordPress is up to date. So, let’s run down a checklist of things you should do so as not to fall victim to the spammers too:
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Bob Donovan, You Sir (and all the Other Spammers), May Kiss My Ass!

Twitter-SPAMLook, there is no delicate way to put this. Bob Donovan, I hereby formally invite you to participate with me in a no-holds-barred MMA style cage match to be broadcast on live television. I’m 100% serious. Because I want to kick your ass, and I’m quite sure I can do it too.

Wait! What’s Going On Here?

My other dear readers may be asking themselves, who is this Bob Donovan, and what exactly has he done to John P.? Well, I’ve got no idea who Bob Donovan is, but what he did to me was send me an annoying Twitter spam with a link to nothing other than an affiliate site (belonging to 10 Best Hosting 2009).

Bob-Donovan-Twitter-Spam

Oh, and that link does nothing other than direct traffic to the Web site link http://www.10besthosting2009.com/#1492937361/. You see that number at the end? I’m sure that is an affiliate tracking link, and 10 Best Hosting is paying this spammer to fish people in to their Web site. That is assuming they are not directly behind it!
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I Still HATE Spammers! DIE SPAMMERS DIE!!!

scarlett-letterDammit! Very few things actually infuriate me more than spammers. That is because Spammers are thieves! There is no difference between a spammer, and someone who would go around stealing pennies from everyone they can find. The logic is exactly the same too, “well, if I only steal from them a little, they won’t notice – but if I do it from a lot of people, I’ll get rich!”

I swear to God, I think the crime for spamming should be death by firing squad. And their entire families should be branded with a scarlet letter and humiliated. And their bodies should be burned until nothing remains but ash. Then, the ashes should be put in a plastic baggie which is also topped off with cow manure and a small chunk of lead. The bags should be loaded on a cargo ship crossing the ocean, and then dropped in when the boat is directly above the Mariana Trench.

Here, let me rank criminals for you:

  1. Child Molesters
  2. Rapists
  3. Spammers
  4. Murders
  5. Politicians

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FREE PORN!!! FREE PORN!!! FREE PORN!!!

Censored!!!Yeah. That’s how they get you, isn’t it? The spammers… they suck you in with these headlines like “Free Porn!”, “Free Viagra”, “Free Men’s Enhancements” and more. They litter our inboxes with this crap and put banner ads in places they don’t even belong. Well, I’m pleased to tell you that one of the biggest spammers in the universe was shut down yesterday.

The iEEE Spectrum most accurately reported:

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was able to persuade a federal court in Chicago to freeze the assets and order the shut down of HerbalKing, reputed to be one of the largest spam e-mailers, for violating the Can-Spam Act of 2003, the New York Times reports this week.

The Times story reported that SpamHaus, a nonprofit antispam research group, estimated that HerbalKing was responsible for sending out one-third of all spam at one point, which included everything from replica watches to (naturally) herbal pills.

The FTC said that HerbalKing was able to send out billions of spam e-mails through the use of botnets. One botnet was made up of 35,000 computers and was able to send 10 billion e-mail messages a day.

The story quotes a senior technology consultant at Sophos, a spam-fighting security firm as saying, “It wouldn’t be a surprise if people don’t notice any difference in their in-box tomorrow morning.”

But the Times of London wrote a much spicier version… even if they did get the facts off a bit:
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Made-For-Adwords (MFA) Sites Suck!

Listen up folks, cause I’m only going to say this one time. If you are choosing your site’s theme based on how many ads you can shove in your visitor’s face, or if people come to your site and have to scroll down the page before they see anything other than Google Ads, then your site sucks. And you do too.

Here’s an example:

Someone stopped by my site and left a comment on the blog with a link to the site in this image. I marked it as spam as soon as I verified the site was MFA. I’ll continue marking MFA sites as spam until the day I die, and I hope that all of my fellow webmasters admin their comments and do likewise.
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200,000 Spams and Counting…

Well, looks like it only took about 3.5 weeks to bump the number of Spam responses up over 200,000.

So, I hit the 100,000 mark on May 7, the 175,000 mark on August 7, and the 200,000 mark on September 2. It looks like I’m averaging about 25,000 Spam comments per month, or over 800 spam comments per day!!! To put this in perspective, I currently have just over 9,000 legitimate, approved comments on the blog.

At the current rate we should wrap up 2008 with over 300,000 and then in 2009 we should see the 700,000 mark. Of course, I would assume that the numbers will increase, and if they do there could be well over 1,000,000 spam comments on this blog by the end of 2009.

I can’t wait until the first time some geeky Webmaster tracks down a spammer and murders him just for spamming. I will contribute to his defense fund. Furthermore, I’ll vote for any presidential candidate who promises to make Spamming a capital offense punishable by death (or at least time in a federal prison.).

Thanks to Automattic for Akismet, without which I would probably have quit blogging.