A new rain of spam
June 1, 2007 at 5:03 am | In akismet, rants, spam, wordpress, wordpress.com |Yesterdays and todays news is that the ‘merkins have arrested one of their top spammers in Seattle. I don’t know how much difference this’ll make, but my understanding is that it’s one or two altogether different US states that give spammers a safe haven and could really make a big difference. Along with the world at large.
Here on the blog I’ve had a recent deluge of trackback spam pointing to something called “correctserver.com”. It’s a subtle one: I first saw it when I referenced an earlier post, and saw not just the one (legitimate) trackback, but a second one appearing simultaneously. I first took that for an innocent wordpress malfunction, then realised that the trackback from “[my post ]| Server software” was spam pointing to someone’s copy of my post. Since then I’ve had a number of them from the same spammer, and they get right through Akismet.
Today I just realised it’s more subtle than that. A week and a half ago, Danny Angus referenced my blog in an entry on his own. The first I saw of that was the trackback; then I saw it on Planet Apache. OK, fine, a legitimate trackback, right? Nope, it was only just this morning it showed up in my feed as [Danny's entry]|Server software that I realised it didn’t link to Danny’s post, but to the spammer’s copy of it at correctserver.com.
A subtle and devious technique. WordPress admin and Akismet: I hope you’re listening!
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correctserver.com has been copying the contents of my posts as well. I reported them to Technorati who had been indexing them and I think they’ve now removed all their posts from the search results. I’m just not sure what they’re actually trying to promote though - the entire site seemed to just be copied posts. Maybe there was advertising I didn’t see because of Privoxy…
Comment by Adrian Sutton — June 1, 2007 #